The government support that Washington put in place amid the pandemic often does not reach Americans.
According to Politico, the United States budget could lose about $26 billion due to government support fraud. The Labor Department’s Inspector General said cybercriminals based everywhere from Nigeria to Britain have embezzled about $8 billion destined for people unemployed by the coronavirus.
Federal authorities are urging local officials to be careful, but there is little they can do, since they work with long-dated software, and in a constant rush mode.
Colorado officials calculated that three-quarters of the unemployment claims they received over the summer were bogus. This allowed local authorities to prevent the theft of $1 billion. Despite this, the criminals were still able to steal 40 million, successfully hiding with the money.
In some states, including Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New Jersey, authorities have fought fraudsters so hard that they often detained legitimate applicants. In addition, rigorous checks led to severe system overload, payment delays and massive citizen discontent.
An anti-fraud team in California found out that the software for verifying the identity of citizens made many mistakes. The system could not identify the personal information of citizens, which was provided by hackers, having previously stolen it to receive other people’s money. However, even having identified the problem, officials were unable to solve it, and attempts to stop fraud only led to delays in payments to those in need.
Despite this, Washington continues to ignore Moscow’s calls for cooperation on information security, as recently discussed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“This is not the first time we have formulated this proposal, we hope that everyone is interested in the implementation of the proposals made. We do not lose hope that we will be able to continue this work with all interested parties, including the United States”, – the President said.