"I'm at Dior having fun with money / I've gotten rich on the EDD." "You have to sell cocaine / I'm fine with filling out applications / the bundles come straight to the bank." "Fuck, this shit is better than passing drugs / I quickly became a fraudster / I was stuck in a cell / now I sit and wait for an email to arrive." The verses of the rapper Nuke Bizzle are the portrait of an era in the US: that of fraud at full hands with aid funds to alleviate the Covid-19 pandemic. EDD stands for California Department of Workforce Development, where Nuke Bizzle lived. It is the state body in charge of distributing the additional unemployment subsidies in the face of the economic downturn caused by the restrictions to stop the virus. The scam was: impersonating the identity of others to request and take an additional 600 dollars per week subsidy granted by the Government. "If you have the number and the number / I have the address / we get it," he sang. The looting was widespread and went far beyond the strike. Other relief funds, such as the Small Business Wage Protection Program or the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, were bled by fraudsters. "Nothing like this has ever happened," Matthew Schneider, a former Michigan tax man who now works as a lawyer, told NBC. “It is the biggest fraud of our time.” Rain of money In March and April 2020, the US economy, like much of the rest of the world, came to a screeching halt. The generalized restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, which was drowning hospitals and saturating morgues, forced the closure of many businesses and sectors. With this, there is a sink in the labor market, with the loss of 21 million jobs in a couple of months. The Government of Donald Trump reacted with stimuli of 3,1 trillion dollars. The following year, with Joe Biden in the White House, they added another $1,9 trillion. Related News standard No A couple abandons their three children and runs away after swindling millions in aid for Covid-19 They left a note for children aged 13, 15 and 16 in which they said "we will be together again one day" News Related The objective was to avoid economic collapse, maintain the purchasing power of families, revive consumption, maintain open businesses. Look at the public funds of Americans: cash checks for salaries less than $100.000 a year, weeks and weeks of additional benefits for the unemployed, non-refundable loans for small businesses… The money came in abundance, but many times it did not go to Who needs it. The biblical disbursement against the pandemic was carried out in a crazy way, with weak award systems, without strict controls. The economy is in a coma and the priority was for the money to flow. The economic revival was the 'Wild West'. The result was fraud on a grand scale. According to an estimate prepared by the Department of Labor last spring, only in unemployment benefits, 163.000 million dollars escaped from the 900.000 million dedicated to helping the unemployed. 10% of the funds 80.000 million dollars went where they should not The plunder in the funds for companies was also enormous. People invented companies, lied about their size, exaggerated the number of employees. At least $80.000 billion - 10% of the funds - went where they shouldn't. Many others were wasted in the program to alleviate the economic disaster in companies. The problem is that, in order to turn on the money tap as quickly as possible, aid applicants simply had to say they needed it. It hardly had to be proven and requests were not thoroughly reviewed. State agencies stopped thousands of applicants, but many took the money. 'Take the money and run' was the spirit of those months. And the extravagant cases of fraud that have come to light since then have shown that it was a control. A single person received unemployment benefits from 29 different states. The same number of a gas station in Houston (Texas) was used to request loans from 150 alleged small businesses. In Florida, two neighbors claimed they had farms with dozens of employees and hundreds of miles of dollars in revenue a year (it was all a fabrication, the 'farm' was their backyard) to defraud $1,5 million. A couple from California filled out requests for financial aid for 151 companies: the 7,2 million they received were spent on a mansion, a Maserati, two other cars and a private plane flight to Montenegro, where they were later arrested. of living for several months as the 'jet set' (in their flight, they forgot about their children; they protested because they escaped with the dog, and not with them). Americans have attended in recent months has a large number of stories of fraudsters who spent the embezzlement on 'lamborghinis', 'ferraris', 'bentleys', jewelry, hotels, luxury fashion…. Many times, flaunting it on social networks. A Georgia man used $57,000 from a loan at a nonexistent business to buy a Pokémon card. It was so easy to get public money that even an employee of the public postal service, the US Postal Service, invented a company to raise relief funds and did not make much effort to think of the nom: 'US Postal Services'. The loan arrived. Tip of the iceberg In those convulsive weeks and months, it included teaching oneself and cheating in YouTube tutorials or instructing others interested in looting the public coffers in exchange for a pinch. That's what Alicia and Andrea Ayers, a mother and daughter from upstate New York, did, applying for more than XNUMX loans for non-existent businesses. You didn't even have to be in the US. to raise those funds. Much of the looting of unemployment benefits - there are estimates that place it in half - occurred from abroad, with thousands of people who filled out online petitions. An investigation by 'ProPublica' showed that requests for IP addresses came from 170 countries and that there were 'farms' in China, Brazil or Nigeria with employees filling in data to obtain subsidies. on YouTube, it has more than 400.000 views - and the rest of the cases cited so far have been caught. According to 'The New York Times', the taxi has charged 1.500 people with fraud against Covid funds, of which just over 450 have been convicted. That is just the tip of the looting iceberg: there have been 39.000 investigations, it is known that there are thousands more cases that will never be investigated. Go for them The level of the robbery is also seen in the number of calls to the number of notices about the Small Business Agency (SBA), one of the agencies that processed the loans: they had about 800 calls a year and in the first twelve months of pandemic we received 148,000 notices. Many are likely to get off scot-free due to lack of time: it takes much less time to steal than to investigate theft. Just this month, Biden succeeded in passing legislation to extend the statute of limitations for these crimes from five to XNUMX years. The president, who blamed his predecessor for the chaos in the granting of loans and aid, promised to pursue creditors to the end: “My message to those cheats is this: you cannot hide. We will find you." The problem is that there are too many cheaters and only 500 people working on the cases. "I'm sure we're going to have to use up to the last day of those ten years," Kevin Chambers, the Justice Department's chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud, told the New York newspaper. Several attorneys for the defendants have used it in US courts.
