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cvanderloo

Nearly 500 Charged With Coronavirus-Related Fraud In Past Year : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...related-fraud-in-the-past-year

Coronavirus COVID fruad

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Call it a nasty side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic — the flare-up in fraud, scams and hoaxes as some people have tried to use the crisis to line their pockets illegally.
  • The grand total that fraudsters tried to scam from the government and the public in those cases is more than $569 million.
  • The department's efforts to target fraud related to COVID-19 fraud date back to last March when then-Attorney General William Barr instructed federal prosecutors across the country to investigate and prosecute scams, price gouging and other coronavirus-related crimes aggressively.
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  • One measure created was the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, which gives loans to businesses to keep employees on the payroll.
  • Economic Injury Disaster Loans, a program designed to provide loans to small businesses and agricultural entities, was also a target for fraud. The department said it has seized $580 million in proceeds so far from fraudulent loan applications.
  • Unemployment insurance — weekly federal unemployment benefits worth $600 a week — also came on line because of the CARES Act.
  • Most notable among these scams are the fake cures and treatments for COVID-19. These have run from attempts to sell everything from industrial bleach to colloidal silver as a miracle cure or treatment for the virus.
  • According to the memo, $626 million in funds had been seized or forfeited due to civil and criminal investigation by the Justice Department involving the Economic Injury Disaster Loans and PPP measures. The subcommittee memo said that amounts to "less than 1% of the nearly $84 billion in potential fraud identified in these programs."
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