According to the US Secret Service, fraudsters have cashed in on the vast amounts of federal aid for people and businesses hurt by the pandemic.
Roy Dotson, the agency's fraud recovery coordinator, reported that criminals had stolen nearly $100 billion from the special relief fund set up to help businesses and individuals who had lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic. According to estimates, the amount of the stolen funds was roughly 3% of the total sum of $3.4 trillion. The bulk of the stolen money, namely $87 billion, could have been paid to the unemployed, but it was siphoned from the system by fraudsters. The Secret Service currently has more than 900 active criminal investigations into relief fund fraud, with 100 people having been arrested so far. The agency has frozen $1.2 billion from the government aid package pending the investigation, Roy Dotson said.
In addition to fraud, there were cases of misuse of the allocated funds. The US Office of the Inspector General estimated $39 billion in unemployment benefits had been wasted. In summer 2021, it turned out that 42 states had not reported overpayments and 40% of the states had not performed required crossmatches to detect improper payments.
