Among the millions of businesses that received PPP loans during the COVID-19 pandemic were small farms in Southwest Florida.
The problem is some of the farms don’t actually exist.
A wheat farm in Lehigh Acres received a loan of more than $20,000, but there’s no farm at the listed address. It’s a one-story home out in the country.
“It’s bizarre,” FGCU finance professor Tom Smythe said of our findings. “You don’t grow wheat in Lehigh Acres.”
NON-EXISTENT FARMS LISTED IN PPP LOAN DATA
The bizarre trend was originally discovered by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that found hundreds of fake farms had received pandemic loans across the United States.