Terry Kilcrease thought he saw a lifeline. He was out of work, living in a hotel in Lewisville, Texas, when he ran across a promising ad on Facebook. People who worked for themselves, it said, could still get loans from the government’s then-13-month-old pandemic Paycheck Protection Program.
Kilcrease had just started selling credit card processing systems to small businesses in early 2020 before the pandemic killed much of the need for cash registers. He hadn’t thought he was eligible for the $800 billion program. But the ad, posted by a company called Blueacorn, convinced him it was worth a try.
“We’ve created a 60-second quiz that can tell you if you qualify and how much you can get,” one ad promised. So Kilcrease registered on the Blueacorn site and answered a few basic questions about his business.
“With a few clicks of a mouse, I had applied,” Kilcrease said. It was so quick, he doesn’t recall many details. Blueacorn checked for all required documents before passing along Kilcrease’s approved application to a lender, Prestamos.
Soon after, Kilcrease received loan documents from the Small Business Administration saying he’d been approved for a $4,790 forgivable loan, which he signed electronically and returned. The money would arrive in his bank account within ten business days, Blueacorn estimated.
Kilcrease was relieved.
“It was everything I needed to get going,” he said. “Just that little bitty bit.”
But the money never made it to Kilcrease. And it never appeared for hundreds of thousands of other applicants, either.
ProPublica has been tracking PPP loans since the government first posted millions of them in July 2020. We kept updating our interactive database as the SBA disclosed more loan information. When the last round of the PPP closed, in May 2021, we noticed something strange: The number of loans the government said it had made kept shrinking with every new release.
