A Florida pastor and his son were arrested this week and charged with fraudulently obtaining more than $8 million in federal COVID relief payments, which were partly used to buy a luxury home near Disney World. Evan Edwards, 64, and his 30-year-old son Josh were taken into custody on Wednesday, several months after NBC News published a story asking why the duo hadn’t been charged with the scam, which federal prosecutors had been aware of since December 2020. Read on to find out how the duo took the government for millions of dollars and how they were finally caught.
In April 2020, Josh Edwards applied for a $6 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to cover payroll, rent, and utilities for his family’s ministry. In the loan application, he claimed that their ASLAN International Ministry had 486 employees and a monthly payroll of $2.7 million. The ministry received an $8.4 million loan. Two months later, the family tried to put a down payment on a $3.7 million home in a Disney World development called Golden Oaks in Orlando, according to federal records. When authorities realized the money was coming from PPP relief, the funds were seized, and an investigation began.
Investigators realized the rest of the PPP money was deposited among multiple bank accounts “in an attempt to hide and conceal their whereabouts,” the federal indictment said. And authorities found…
