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Hope. Many businessmen lost this in the Corona crisis. Until the Federal Councilor Ueli Maurer (69) presented in mid-March a program with which emergency loans could be obtained quickly and easily in excellent conditions. Suddenly, employees could be paid again, rents paid, and family fed.
The program ended at the end of July and the figures are huge: 136,117 emergency loans were taken according to the Secretary of State for the Economy (Seco). Total amount: 16.8 billion Swiss francs! Rarely has a Swiss economic program been so successful. Bloss: Some took advantage of the plight of others. Criminals benefited from the fact that it was easier than ever to obtain money from the state.
More than 400 procedures
A VIEW request to the cantons now shows: So far, more than 400 criminal proceedings have been started due to corona credit fraud! The amount of damage cannot be precisely quantified because many cantons do not want to publish figures. From the documents that are available to SEE, it is clear: The state was scammed out of around 50 million francs! Almost 17 million francs were stolen in Zurich alone, in Vaud it was 11 million. In the relatively small canton of Lucerne there were 6.5 million. With the exception of the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, each canton has opened at least one criminal case.
Scammers proceed differently. Some apply for multiple loans from different banks, some spend the money on luxury cars instead of employees, and some buy bankrupt companies for which a loan is then applied. But the most popular is the sales scam, as VIEW learns from the cantonal prosecutors: employers indicate that their sales are higher than they really are. Since credits are tied to sales, they get more money. Some received tens of thousands of francs in this way. Other millions.
Do scammers get away with it?
It is precisely these scammers that the federal government wants to get away with. An error in calculating the expected credit limit can happen quickly, writes a senior Seco employee to prosecutors. If funds are returned, the fraudsters must be pleased. Opinion not shared by cantonal prosecutors. The Zurich prosecution told BLICK that “due consideration would be given” to the sentence. Basically, however, it belongs “who takes advantage of a national emergency and the will to help the federal government to prosecute and punish systematically.”
How much money the federal government will lose in the end to loan scammers cannot yet be predicted. One thing is certain: prosecutors will be worrying about the issue for a long time. According to Seco, around 850 potential cases of abuse are still being investigated.
