Sheridan, Wyoming, a small town nestled at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains Used For Huge Covid Fraud

Sheridan, Wyoming, a small town nestled at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, doesn’t seem like the setting for massive fraud.

But when the U.S. government started to disburse billions of dollars in emergency loans to businesses in 2020 to maintain their payrolls throughout COVID-19 shutdowns, hundreds of companies with the same Sheridan address applied and received tens of millions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans.

Some are real businesses. But dozens have little evidence of existing as legitimate operations. Now, companies registered at 30 N Gould St. are listed in a half-dozen criminal indictments of people across the country who allegedly stole millions in COVID relief payments from the federal government, according to an analysis by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

In person, 30 N. Gould St., is a modest office building home to Sheridan’s offices of Registered Agents Inc., a national corporate services firm. But on paper, more than 266,000 companies have used this address to incorporate between 2019 and 2024, according to an ICIJ analysis of information provided by the data firm OpenCorporates.

Firms like Registered Agents file official paperwork on behalf of businesses and, in doing so, can be used to help mask the true owners. Registered Agents told ICIJ that it works closely with law enforcement and does not have extensive ties to the firms it helps administer.

“Our address and business name appear as a registered agent on thousands of business entity records with the Wyoming Secretary of State, which has been misconstrued as us having a controlling interest in, or extensive relationship with, those entities,” Dan Mahoney, a spokesperson for the company, said in an emailed statement. “This is simply not the case.”

In recent years Wyoming, the country’s least populated state, has emerged as the nation’s leading tax haven. The fraud indictments add to growing evidence that Wyoming is a major new destination for people outside the state — including criminals, suspected North Korean sanctions evaders, and those with wealth of dubious origin — to incorporate secretive limited liability companies, or LLCs, and other entities to hold and move cash.

Tara Berg, the county assessor for Wyoming’s Fremont County, told ICIJ that over the past several years residents have begun complaining about shell companies that, in an apparent attempt to appear legitimate, have falsely used the residents’ home addresses on corporate filings.

“We have people bringing us stacks of mail that they’re getting for these companies at their addresses,” Berg said. “People are panicked.” Read more here.