(DCWatchdog.com) – The greatest grift in American history occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some $400 billion embezzled or squandered out of the total US government relief aid of about $4.2 trillion.
An analysis by The Associated Press found that some $280 billion in federal coronavirus relief money was directly stolen by fraudsters, while an additional $123 billion “was wasted or misspent,” Newsmax reports.
While the total loss is at least about 10% of the US government’s pandemic stimulus packages, the known embezzled sum is likely to grow bigger as more fraud cases are being investigated, the report points out.
It is noted that much of the theft was committed through “brazen” but “simple” schemes. For instance, fraudsters collected unemployment checks and other benefits with the Social Security numbers of prisoners and deceased persons.
At the same time, federal loan applications were not cross-checked against the database of the US Treasury Departments to prevent fraud.
While many fraudsters were criminals with records or entire organized crime gangs, others were “ordinary” people like a “US soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri, and a roofing contractor in Montana.”
Experts and investigators commented that the federal government wanted to spend trillions of dollars in relief aid too swiftly and, respectively, engaged in “too little oversight” and placed “too few restrictions” on applicants.
“In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy,” the report notes.
“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access. Folks kind-of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal,” observed Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the US Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington.
Over 2,230 suspects have been charged over fraud schemes involving pandemic funds, with thousands of ongoing investigations.
It is noted that most of the stolen money was siphoned off from three significant relief initiatives designed to help small businesses and the unemployed. They were launched under the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration.
BILLIONS IN COVID RELIEF WAS STOLEN: Much of the estimated $400 billion, or more, in COVID-19 theft was brazen, even simple. https://t.co/3KMh9J5Omm
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) June 12, 2023
