A federal grand jury has indicted a Los Angeles woman on charges stemming from an alleged $18 million coronavirus relief fraud scheme, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.
Marisela Nuno, 53, is accused of defrauding two pandemic-era federal programs: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. According to court documents, Nuno submitted applications seeking more than $15.7 million in PPP funds and over $2.6 million in EIDL funds on behalf of businesses and entities she claimed to own.
Prosecutors allege those applications contained false statements about the number of employees, average monthly payroll, gross revenues, and eligibility for the programs, and that Nuno backed up the applications with fabricated tax documents.
Once the money came through, authorities say, Nuno spent it in ways that had nothing to do with payroll or business survival — allegedly using the funds to buy private property, cover business startup costs, and make payments to family members.
The Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs says Nuno has been charged with three counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering.
Part of a Larger Pattern
The case adds to a long list of prosecutions tied to pandemic relief programs that distributed trillions of dollars with limited verification at the height of the COVID-19 emergency. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Breitbart News in June 2025 that federal bureaucrats allowed fraudsters to walk off with $79 billion in coronavirus aid because basic safeguards were never put in place.
“Bureaucrats were asleep at the wheel and let COVID fraudsters take taxpayers for a very expensive ride, while small businesses in need were left out in the cold,” Ernst said.
A government watchdog separately identified nearly $1 billion in COVID-era unemployment benefits earlier this year that were at risk of being claimed by fraudsters, Breitbart News has reported.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in April that the scale of pandemic relief spending helped normalize fraud that has since spread into other federal programs.
“The question really is, how did it get so bad? And part of it is COVID, because when you start throwing money at problems, you don’t watch where it’s going, and fraudsters learn they can corrupt the system, because they never realized it was so easy to steal from the government, then they’ll start to weaponize it and use it in other areas like Medicare and Medicaid,” Oz said.
The indictment against Nuno represents the latest in a wave of federal cases targeting individuals accused of exploiting the PPP and EIDL programs for personal gain rather than the small-business relief they were designed to provide.
