Social benefit fraud

2021: Fraudsters stole $400 billion in unemployment benefits from the United States

In early June 2021, the IB company ID.me reported that the United States lost more than $400 billion due to fraud in the processing of unemployment benefits. The head of the company, Blake Hall, noted that this is almost 50% of all payments that were assigned to American unemployed.

The CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions believes that at least 70% of the money stolen by fraudsters subsequently ended up outside the United States. According to him, most of the funds went to criminal groups from China, Nigeria and Russia. As a rule, criminals steal personal information, after which they use it to impersonate the applicant and appropriate the amount of funds. In some cases, fraudsters trick a person into revealing their personal data.

Fraudsters stole more than $400 billion in unemployment benefits from the United States

President Biden made it clear that this type of activity of criminal syndicates is despicable and unacceptable. That's why we allocated $2 billion to modernize the user interface as part of the American Rescue Plan, established the Department of Justice Anti-Fraud Task Force and support government initiatives to prevent identity theft, "said White House economist Gene Sperling.

Unemployment fraud is now offered in the darknet on the principle of "software as a service." Criminals primarily focus on states in which there is no effective counteraction to this type of fraud.

According to ID.me, the United States spent over $3 trillion on direct payments to the population and business, but in addition to fraud, failures were observed in the distribution system itself. According to the Office of Government Control (GOA), the US Treasury allocated $1.4 billion to payments to more than 1 million Americans who, as it turned out, have already died.^[1]

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