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Tuesday, October 13th, 2020

‘Too sweet of a pie’: Cybercriminals steal $8B in Covid relief funds

Author:     KATY MURPHY and REBECCA RAINEY
Source:     Politico
Publication Date:     10/12/2020 04:30 AM EDT
 Link: ‘Too sweet of a pie’: Cybercriminals steal $8B in Covid relief funds
Stephan:   As a result of the incompetence of the handling of the pandemic, no national safe system was put in place to handle the billions involved with the Covid relief funds. Therefore, while millions of American families are barely hanging on financially, billions of their tax dollars have been grifted away. Here is an aspect of the pandemic that has not received much attention.
State officials are seeing big surges in unemployment applications indicating that criminals are trying to game the system. Credit: Paul Sakuma/AP

The Secret Service and Labor Department have been warning states for months that criminal networks are trying to steal billions of dollars in federal pandemic unemployment aid. But the overburdened and antiquated state systems that send out the checks have been unable to stop a lot of the fraud.

Using huge databases of stolen personal information, cybercriminals based everywhere from Nigeria to London have pocketed an estimated $8 billion meant for people forced out of work due to the coronavirus so far, the Labor Department’s inspector general told states last month. The IG predicts that $26 billion in the federal aid programs alone eventually could be lost to fraud.

The system is easy to breach because Congress allowed applicants to receive some payments before providing documents verifying their identities as lawmakers rushed to pump relief into the economy back in March.Despite the warnings, the federal government largely left it to states to detect which applications are […]

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