Covid rip-off artists

 Washington Post:

‘A magnet for rip-off artists’: Fraud siphoned billions from pandemic unemployment benefits

Identity theft and other sophisticated criminal schemes contributed to potentially $163 billion in waste, while inflicting harm on unwitting victims.

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Brown-Thomas is part of a sprawling community of victims caught up in a massive series of attacks targeting the nation’s generous coronavirus aid programs. The more than $5 trillion approved since the start of the pandemic has become a wellspring for criminal activity, allowing fraudsters to siphon money away from hard-hit American workers and businesses who needed the help most.

The exact scope of the fraud targeting federal aid initiatives is unknown, even two years later. With unemployment benefits, however, the theft could be significant. Testifying at a little-noticed congressional hearing this spring, a top watchdog for the Labor Department estimated there could have been “at least” $163 billion in unemployment-related “overpayments,” a projection that includes wrongly paid sums as well as “significant” benefits obtained by malicious actors.

So far, the United States has recaptured just over $4 billion of that, according to state workforce data furnished by the Labor Department this March. That amounts to roughly 2.4 percent of the wrongful payments, if the government’s best estimate is accurate, raising the specter that Washington may never get most of the money back.
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 Criminals employed tools known as botnets to fire off thousands of applications, federal officials say, often with a single computer click. And they openly swapped tips for defrauding the government on popular websites and apps, including the messaging service Telegram. That has continued this year, as research showed at least two dozen groups with nearly 200,000 members openly discussed ways to avert states’ defenses and siphon funds just over an eight-week period in March and April.

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There is much more.  

Finding and prosecuting these high-tech crooks is going to take a lot of effort.  The number of potential criminals dwarfs some states' prison populations.