About £1.1 billion out of around £47 billion of bounce-back loans disbursed by the UK government to small businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic have been identified as fraud. Revealing this, the Reuters news agency said that while £1.1 billion is the figure of fraud confirmed so far, the National Audit Office believes the fraudulently claimed loans are likely to touch £5 billion, which means more scam are expected to come out as investigations progress. After the UK government announced the bounce-back loan scheme in May 2020, 1.6 million business enterprises were given loans of up to £50,000 each from British banks.
