by Jeff Miller at The Republic Brief
Approximately $100 billion in pandemic relief funds have been stolen by criminals, the Secret Service reported Tuesday.
Money was illegally diverted from several Small Business Administration programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, and another program.
PayPal and Green Dot Corporation have recovered more than $400 million. As of early 2020, the government has spent about $3.5 trillion on Covid relief.
The U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday that criminals have stolen close to $100 billion in pandemic relief funds.
SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and another program to distribute unemployment compensation funds were targeted by fraudsters.
A total of $2.3 billion in stolen funds has been recovered so far, leading to the arrests of over 100 suspects ranging from individuals to organized groups, according to the agency. Covid relief money has totaled more than $3.5 trillion since the outbreak began in early 2020.
Besides its more well-known job protecting presidents, the Secret Service also said it had appointed a new national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator to oversee the vast number of fraud investigations triggered by all that theft.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for over 29 years and worked some complex fraud investigations for 20 plus years, and I’ve never seen something at this scale,” said Roy Dotson who was named to the new Assistant Special Agent in Charge role in the agency.
CNBC’s Dotson said criminals have had an easier time obtaining funds due to the ease of obtaining them.
There’s no doubt that the programs were easily accessible online. And so, with that, comes the opportunity for bad actors to get into that mix,” he stated. “It was necessary to try to get these funds out to people that were truly hurting, and no fault of anybody.
Over 900 pandemic fraud investigations are currently active at the Secret Service, Dotson added.
It’s a wide range because the pot was so big. “You not only have your typical transnational organized groups and domestic organized groups, criminal groups, but you have individuals that decided to take advantage of that. So, there’s many different patterns and investigative intelligence that we develop that I can’t really go into. But we’ve mapped out kind of some of the different characteristics of different groups.
In his new position,…
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