‘Easy money’: How international scam artists pulled off an epic theft of Covid benefits

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Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in Covid benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from American taxpayers, officials and experts say.

“The states have been chronically underfunded for years--they're running 1980s technology,” Hall said.Along with the huge losses inflicted on the U.S. treasury, the criminals also hurt tens of thousands of Americans, many of whom suffered delays in getting much-needed benefits.

So far there has been relatively little recovery of the stolen cash – or accountability for the criminals who took it. The inspector general pointed out in a recent report that the Labor Department reduced testing and reporting requirements on state unemployment systems during the pandemic.“It makes me sick to my stomach, particularly when I see how much is coming out of my taxes each month for unemployment,” said Agari’s John Wilson.

Examples of criminals wearing masks trying to defeat identity verification software and steal Covid-19 unemployment benefits, assembled by ID.me, a company that has contracts to help with unemployment claimant verification in 27 states.One of the few examples in which analysts have pointed the finger at a specific foreign group involves a Nigerian fraud ring dubbed “Scattered Canary,” by security researchers.

Scattered Canary and other groups made use of so-called money mules – witting or unwitting third parties who moved the stolen funds through bank accounts so that they could be transferred out of the country, Najarian said.

 

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