Scammers got nearly 30% of Arizona COVID-19 unemployment pay

[Half Cocked]

What? A fraud-ridden government handout program?

Scammers were able to pocket nearly 30% of the $16 billion in unemployment insurance payments sent out by Arizona since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the director of the state agency overseeing the program said Thursday.

No surprises here. The government has a history of being a poor steward of the taxpayer's money.

The amount lost to fraud is between $4.3 billion and $4.4 billion, Department of Economic Security Director Michael Wisehart said. Most of that money is probably lost forever because it was siphoned off by out-of-state or overseas scammers who took advantage of the lack of identity verification early in the program.

The state was able to recover $1.4 billion it had paid out, Wisehart said. And fraud prevention systems the state rolled out in the summer of 2020 have prevented more than $75 billion in additional fraudulent payments from being made, he said.

It appears as if government handout programs are an attractive target for scammers. Is anyone ever prosecuted for ripping-off the government or is this a situation where no one bothers to go after the cheats?

“I feel horrible for the taxpayer, for myself as a taxpayer, for all taxpayers, that this happened,” Wisehart said of the fraud loss. “But I’ll tell you, I would be way more angry at me and us if this was into 2021 and it extended beyond the first two or three months of the pandemic where it was true chaos.”

What is happening in AZ is repeated across the United States.

Pandemic unemployment fraud is not solely an Arizona problem. The inspector general's office at the U.S. Department of Labor estimated in June that states will have improperly paid out more than $87 billion of the $873 billion in special COVID-19 unemployment benefits by the time they ended on Sept. 6.

It's $87 billion if you believe the government numbers. I don't trust the government to tell us the truth so the actual losses due to fraud may be higher than this.

https://kjzz.org/content/1721469/scammers-got-nearly-30-arizona-covid-19-unemployment-pay

 

[Doc]

My luck, I would have gotten caught. Oh well. It’s off to work I go.

 

[A_C Guy]

My luck, I would have gotten caught. Oh well. It’s off to work I go.

They only catch Americans or people in the USA.
They caught a couple people in Florida who scammed about a million each.

 

[Doc]

My luck, I would have gotten caught. Oh well. It’s off to work I go.

They only catch Americans or people in the USA.
They caught a couple people in Florida who scammed about a million each.

Well that just makes everyone involved look silly.

 

[NBC_LT]

Someone tried to steal my identity last summer in scamming AZ Dept. of Economic Security - right after the lock-down ended in May. Got a VISA card in the mail for my unemployment... never unemployed in my life...

Did all the prudent things to do, reported it, etc. Ended up talking to an State investigator last winter holiday season - they told me that they were slammed with false unemployment claims - people like me calling all the time who all the sudden found themselves in the final stage of activation for unemployment benefits.

The investigator claimed that the admission/registration standards for reporting were lowered due to the unorthodox inclusion of self-employed "gig" workers. So it was easy for some jerk with minimal identification/information about me to "qualify" for the DES assistance - they were just unsuccessful in changing my residence/address before the AZ DES card shipped. I'm sure that many more transient/younger people were scammed in this way tho-

Anyone else here get hit with that load of &#$^&!!?