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More money, more problems!
More money, more problems! The Secret Service has confiscated a whopping $2 billion in stolen COVID-19 unemployment relief funds agency officials said Thursday. The agency says the money has been returned to states.
CNBC reported “Programs in at least 30 states received the money after the agency determined several recipients had fraudulently applied for pandemic-related unemployment.”
Secret Service assistant special agent in charge, Roy Dotson, told CNBC “this is typical of the cyber fraud we deal with annually. It’s just compounded based on additional funds from Covid relief…the criminals did take full advantage of the programs to try to steal from them.”
Dotson added pandemic-related fraud will continue to be an ongoing investigation, and that the $2 billion in returned money to the states was a “conservative estimate.” The fast rollout of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, attempting to get relief funds in the pockets of recipients quickly made it easy prey for “fraudsters.”
A number of only $2 billion returned does look quite small when the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General released a report in March saying at least $89 billion of the estimated $896 billion in unemployment programs funds “could be paid improperly, with a significant portion attributable to fraud.”
According to Dotson, fraudulent actions typically involved stealing identities of people who qualified for unemployment benefits. There were also identities stolen from people who had not filed for unemployment.
The Secret service also announced it has seized over $640 million in funds defrauded primarily from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. “It opened some 690 unemployment insurance investigations and 720 investigations related to those two programs” reports CNBC.
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More money, more problems!
More money, more problems! The Secret Service has confiscated a whopping $2 billion in stolen COVID-19 unemployment relief funds agency officials said Thursday. The agency says the money has been returned to states.
CNBC reported “Programs in at least 30 states received the money after the agency determined several recipients had fraudulently applied for pandemic-related unemployment.”
Secret Service assistant special agent in charge, Roy Dotson, told CNBC “this is typical of the cyber fraud we deal with annually. It’s just compounded based on additional funds from Covid relief…the criminals did take full advantage of the programs to try to steal from them.”
Dotson added pandemic-related fraud will continue to be an ongoing investigation, and that the $2 billion in returned money to the states was a “conservative estimate.” The fast rollout of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, attempting to get relief funds in the pockets of recipients quickly made it easy prey for “fraudsters.”
A number of only $2 billion returned does look quite small when the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General released a report in March saying at least $89 billion of the estimated $896 billion in unemployment programs funds “could be paid improperly, with a significant portion attributable to fraud.”
According to Dotson, fraudulent actions typically involved stealing identities of people who qualified for unemployment benefits. There were also identities stolen from people who had not filed for unemployment.
The Secret service also announced it has seized over $640 million in funds defrauded primarily from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. “It opened some 690 unemployment insurance investigations and 720 investigations related to those two programs” reports CNBC.