A Castle Rock man is headed to federal prison after authorities say he used pandemic-relief funds to buy luxury vehicles and properties. The case involves federal emergency-aid programs created during the COVID-19 crisis.
The FBI Denver office said in a post that an unnamed Castle Rock man fraudulently obtained more than $5.3 million in COVID relief funds.
The post said the unnamed man used the money to buy luxury vehicles and properties. That total differs from indictment-based reporting, which says Joshua Lybolt applied for and received nearly $5 million in COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans, plus $41,667 in Paycheck Protection Program funds, between April 2020 and August 2022, according to
Aspen Daily News
. The discrepancy between the two dollar figures has not been reconciled in available reporting.
The U.S. Department of Justice's District of Colorado office announced in July 2024 that Joshua Lybolt, then 45, and Magdalena Lybolt, then 46, both of Castle Rock, had been indicted by a federal grand jury. Court documents cited by CBS News Colorado describe Lybolt as a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, and the indictment shows the money went toward a 2016 Land Rover Range Rover, a 2022 Porsche Taycan, properties in Snowmass Village and Avon, and memberships at Country Club at Castle Pines, per CBS News Colorado.
Four Properties in the Roaring Fork Valley and One in Avon
The case involves properties in Snowmass Village and Avon. Among the purchases, an entity called Prime JMXE acquired a Woodbridge condominium in Snowmass Village for $1,069,000 in June 2022, according to the Aspen Daily News.
Federal attorneys have since asked the court to authorize the U.S. Marshals Service to immediately market, sell and dispose of the Snowmass Village condominium, the Aspen Daily News reported in a separate article.
Sentence and Unresolved Questions
WesternSlopeNow.com/KREX reported that Joshua Lybolt, 47, of Castle Rock, was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering in connection with the fraudulent COVID-19 relief loans. The court ordered $5,346,802.61 in restitution.
Part of a Broader Pattern of COVID Fraud
Programs in the Lybolt Case The Lybolt case involved the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.
What the Fraud Estimate Shows
The U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General estimated in Report 23-09 that more than $200 billion in COVID-19 relief loans were potentially fraudulent. That is a program-wide estimate, not a finding that every flagged loan involved proven fraud, and it does not by itself show how oversight and enforcement changed from the programs’ launch through later investigations, according to the SBA Office of Inspector General.
