Just imagine what you can buy with one hundred billion dollars. Maybe a 25 billion worth of Big Macs, 44 million season tickets (prime field level) to the Denver Broncos, or some 1.8 million five-carat diamonds or more than a million Teslas.
Well, we are talking about one hundred billion dollars that have been reported stolen after the federal government’s massive trillion-dollar COVID-19 pandemic relief funds is now nowhere to be found.
According to the News 10 report the estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, said Roy Dotson, the agency’s national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, in an interview. The Secret Service didn’t include COVID fraud cases prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The report stated, “Nearly $100 BILLION AT MINIMUM has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.”
“Who couldn’t have guessed that the Big Government would pay no attention to the distribution?”
The report added that most of the figure comes from unemployment fraud and the Labor Department added that the estimated $87 billion was paid out in benefits that probably should not have been paid.
And if you’re going to ask how about the other losses? Well, it’s due to other fraud.
“They have retrieved under $4 billion, so forget seeing most of the funds returned to the treasury,” the report said.
Dotson said that roughly 3% of the $3.4 trillion dispersed, the amount stolen from pandemic benefits programs shows “the sheer size of the pot is enticing to the criminals.”
The ABC report also explained “The Secret Service said it has seized more than $1.2 billion while investigating unemployment insurance and loan fraud and has returned more than $2.3 billion of fraudulently obtained funds by working with financial partners and states to reverse transactions. The Secret Service says it has more than 900 active criminal investigations into pandemic fraud, with cases in every state, and 100 people have been arrested so far.”
The cases against more than 150 defendants and recaptured $75 million from failed Paycheck Protection Program cases have been brought by the Department of Justice.
One of the best-known programs created through the March 2020 CARES Act, PPP offered low-interest, forgivable loans to small businesses struggling to meet payroll and other expenses during pandemic-related shutdowns.
Dotson added “Can we stop fraud? Will we? No, but I think we can definitely prosecute those that need to be prosecuted and we can do our best to recover as much fraudulent pandemic funds that we can.”
Sources: WND, ABC News, Independent Sentinel, News 10, Fox 59
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