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A Miami woman was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison after she was convicted of money laundering with COVID-19 relief loans.
Below is an official press release statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida.
MIAMI – A Miami woman was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison for money laundering of nearly $2 million in fraudulent COVID-19 relief loans, after previously pleading guilty in October 2023.
From April 2020 through April 2021, Maritza Morales Hermoso, 58, of Miami, Florida, and others, including co-defendant Javier Lazo Cabrera, conspired to defraud private lenders and the Small Business Administration (SBA) by filing false and fraudulent loan applications for multiple companies under both the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, despite that several of those companies had no payroll and were not actively doing business at the time the loan applications were submitted. The applications were supported by fabricated payroll documents and inflated employee numbers. As a result of these false and fraudulent applications, a California-based SBA-approved PPP lender disbursed close to $2 million in fraudulent loan proceeds to bank accounts controlled by Hermoso.