A U.S. District Judge has handed down the punishment for a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, man convicted of Wire Fraud. Joshua Booth, age 27, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay a special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund in the amount of $100. Booth was indicted by a federal grand jury in August of 2023. He pleaded guilty on January 10, 2024. The conviction stemmed from an incident in May of 2021, when Booth fraudulently submitted an application for a Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) loan on behalf of his purported business through Fountainhead, a third-party participating lender in the PPP. In support of his application, Booth submitted a fraudulent Schedule C, an Internal Revenue Service form for profit or loss from a business, for “Booth cleaning service,” located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The business did not exist and the form contained false statements, which Booth knew were false, including the gross income of the purported business. As a result of Booth’s false and fraudulent application and supporting documentation, Booth received a PPP loan in the amount of $20,833 and then used the funds for his own purposes. This case was investigated by the Department of Homeland Security – Homeland Security Investigations. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann M. Hoffman prosecuted the case. On May 17, 2021, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud. The Task Force bolsters efforts to investigate and prosecute the most culpable domestic and international criminal actors and assists agencies tasked with administering relief programs to prevent fraud by, among other methods, augmenting and incorporating existing coordination mechanisms, identifying resources and techniques to uncover fraudulent actors and their schemes, and sharing and harnessing information and insights gained from prior enforcement efforts. For more information on the Department’s response to the pandemic, please visit https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus. Anyone with information about allegations of attempted fraud involving COVID-19 can report it by calling the Department of Justice’s National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF) Hotline at 866- 720-5721 or via the NCDF Web Complaint Form at: https://www.justice.gov/disaster-fraud/ncdf-disaster-complaint-form. Booth was immediately remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.