I'm less concerned (but still concerned) about foreign scammers pretending to be citizens for a moderate unemployment payout than I am about the countless dollars stolen through pandemic relief...
I'm less concerned (but still concerned) about foreign scammers pretending to be citizens for a moderate unemployment payout than I am about the countless dollars stolen through pandemic relief benefits to companies who lied about their employee numbers, or function.
This is why any time a good program that helps human beings is met with criticisms of "how will we pay for it", it's such utter horse apples. We have far more money than we have when it comes to...
“I’ve got a cynical view on this,” Talcove admits. “I don’t really think politicians give a shit about the people in need because if they really cared, they would do what they need to do.”
This is why any time a good program that helps human beings is met with criticisms of "how will we pay for it", it's such utter horse apples. We have far more money than we have when it comes to guns or war or wasted without basic due diligence.
She knows people in her neighborhood who needed help but wouldn’t take money from the feds because they were so suspicious of the government. “They just couldn’t believe it,” she says. “They thought the government would take it all back or fuck with them in some way.”
And they will. In Canada they are chasing the smallest of the small frys one at a time, while completely ignoring the massive white collar ones. Because they know we as individuals don't have teams of lawyers.
they got hit with an IRS bill that said they’d received $30,000 in unemployment funds from the state of California, a place they’d never lived or visited. The IRS claimed they now owed more than $5,000 in taxes. Thus began an ordeal that’s still ongoing two years later.
The fact that that one family has still not cleared their names in two years is insane. It shouldn't take more than a phone call and a visit.
The pandemic relief was the biggest bailout in history, and it opened the door to wide-scale fraud the likes of which no one had ever seen — more than three years later, we still don't know how much damage was done.
IN LATE MARCH 2020, Haywood Talcove, a CEO at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, was packing up his office, having sent his employees home. He was worrying about laying off his staff, his family’s health, and how he was going to manage two young kids at home during the pandemic.
But when President Trump announced an initial $2.2 trillion relief package to bail out the millions of Americans desperate for cash during the national lockdown, his concern turned away from the coronavirus. An expert in cybersecurity, Talcove has worked in both the private and public sectors, and has been raising the alarm about the government’s exposure to scams for many years. And now, it was like all of his prior analysis and warnings about fraud had just become real.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to allow anyone to get unemployment-insurance benefits,” he recalls. “The systems are vulnerable. All you needed was a name, a date of birth, an address, and a social security number.”
Talcove’s a proud Boston guy who moved to Washington, D.C., in 1990, and went on to help an anti-government-waste-style Republican become governor of New Hampshire. He knew the relief plan would be irresistible to scam artists and especially tempting to organized transnational criminal groups. “As soon as the CARES money was announced, we started seeing squawking on the dark web, criminal groups in China, Nigeria, Romania, and Russia — they see our systems are open,” Talcove says. He estimates that “the United States government is the single largest funder of cybersecurity fraud in the world.”
This is what got me: No. The US taxpayers are. The government is just incompetent when it comes the those tax dollars, and the security of how those dollars are distributed.
This is what got me:
He estimates that “the United States government is the single largest funder of cybersecurity fraud in the world.”
No. The US taxpayers are. The government is just incompetent when it comes the those tax dollars, and the security of how those dollars are distributed.
I'm less concerned (but still concerned) about foreign scammers pretending to be citizens for a moderate unemployment payout than I am about the countless dollars stolen through pandemic relief benefits to companies who lied about their employee numbers, or function.
This is why any time a good program that helps human beings is met with criticisms of "how will we pay for it", it's such utter horse apples. We have far more money than we have when it comes to guns or war or wasted without basic due diligence.
And they will. In Canada they are chasing the smallest of the small frys one at a time, while completely ignoring the massive white collar ones. Because they know we as individuals don't have teams of lawyers.
The fact that that one family has still not cleared their names in two years is insane. It shouldn't take more than a phone call and a visit.
This is what got me:
No. The US taxpayers are. The government is just incompetent when it comes the those tax dollars, and the security of how those dollars are distributed.
Agreed. And as a U.S. taxpayer, I find this extremely frustrating.