The pandemic relief was the biggest bailout in history. It also opened the door to wide-scale fraud. Here's the story of a TRILLION-dollar scam, the greatest grift of all time ⬇️
, we potentially dished out some $16.2 billion to folks with “suspicious” emails; $267 million was sent to the identities matching current federal prisoners, some on death row; another nearly $29 billion to people living in multiple states; we even sent out more than $139 million to dead people. California alone accounts for a whopping $20 billion in pandemic unemployment-insurance fraud.
Nonetheless, debates will continue for years to come over how the money was doled out — speed versus security. The problem was so large that millions of people were at risk; the necessity couldn’t have been clearer. But the cost? One trillion dollars possibly lost to crooks, many of them our fellow citizens gouging the government during a crisis. Thousands of potential victims, not to mention all of the folks who desperately needed the money and couldn’t get it.
Peck had been stationed in New York early on in his career, and he says he caught a warning of what was coming when, in the aughts, NYPD detectives started telling him that gangs had shifted from selling drugs on the corner to “selling stacks of information,” he says. “It was names, dates of birth, social security, all the basic personal-identification information.”
Katzenstein says law enforcement has had to react to large-scale fraud in times of crisis before, but the scale and ease of these crimes make the job exponentially harder. “We call it pay and chase: The government pays out the benefits, and then, if there’s fraud, we’ll try to claw it back,” she says. “That was fine in the old days. But nowadays, when with a few strokes on a keyboard you can submit a hundred applications, we can never keep up.
The couple has no idea how their identities were stolen, but now they are incredibly careful in every transaction. Steven thinks one thing the government could focus on is helping victims as much as it has on enforcing the law. “They should set up a task force to help people like us navigate the system and get through this,” he says. “Because not until this is done, are we going to be good.
IN A SMALL CITY with some rough neighborhoods, I meet up with a woman I’ll call Danni. She’s Black, pretty, streetwise, her eyes sparkle and don’t miss much. She’s got kids. Lives in a neighborhood near where she was raised, with lots of street crime and drug use. She’s open, funny, and warm, but with the edge of someone who, when they were younger, was probably a wild child and heaps of trouble. And during the pandemic, she says, she stole money from the state and federal government.
She rolls her eyes and laughs when I ask her about Nuke Bizzle’s case and says she knew when to call it all off. After years of running all kinds of grifts that she’d prefer not to elaborate on, she has a sense for these things. “I call it living off the land,” she says. “I didn’t get greedy. That’s how you get caught. I kept it low risk. But I was going to get mine. I lived it up: hotels, trips — flying was cheap during the pandemic.” She was out at clubs most nights.
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