The Biggest Fraud Ever Perpetrated Against the U.S.

 

The scamming of pandemic unemployment relief benefits is now being described as “the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the U.S.” by private security experts. What’s really scary is that it may not yet be over.

The story is back in the news because those experts have done more work to identify where the money has gone instead of to the unemployed Americans to whom it was intended. NBC reports:

Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in Covid benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, officials and experts say. And they say it is still happening.

Among the ripest targets for the cybertheft have been jobless programs. The federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment relief has been stolen, but credible estimates range from $87 billion to $400 billion—at least half of which went to foreign criminals, law enforcement officials say.

More @ The Independent Institute