Fraud Specialist Indicates 50% Of Unemployment Insurance Money Was Stolen

This type of theft has been made possible by sophisticated methods of identity theft from the beneficiaries. According to studies, the money has gone to criminal groups in Russia and China

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Unemployment insurance is one of the main benefits that has allowed millions of Americans to have a little money to pay for basic expenses such as food. Although this money has been of great help for a large sector of the population, it has also been for criminals.

According to the Axios portal, approximately half of unemployment aid may have been stolen by crime. In economic terms, the stolen represents $ 400, 000 millions of dollars. The study explains that this has been possible through fraud.

The way in which fraud occurs has to do with identity theft , those who comment on it pose as applicants for support, a very common practice. There are also those who make potential beneficiaries provide them with their personal information and they take advantage of it at their convenience.

There are even those who have more sophisticated methods to carry out fraud, which They do it through debit cards, a situation that allows them to get money from ATMs quickly . This situation gives them the possibility of transferring the obtained abroad, sometimes it is done through bitcoin, because this way the money cannot be tracked easily.

In In this sense, firms such as ID.me, an expert in preventing fraud, through its CEO, Blake Hall, explained in the Axios report that the United States may have lost in robberies up to 50% of all unemployment aid money . Which represents a severe blow to the public finances of the federal government.

ID. Explained to me that, most likely, most of the money ended up in the hands of foreign criminal groups, which makes the problem a matter of national security due to the complexity of how the money could have been moved to other latitudes.

Other expert firms on the subject as LexisNexis Risk Solutions ruled something similar to ID.me, stating that, at least, the 70% of the stolen money ended up in criminal groups in countries such as China, Nigeria, Russia, among other nations. Experts agree that the rest of the money is held by criminal groups in the country .

According to the report, experts point out that the states most affected by this situation are those that lack fraud detection mechanisms . They assure that there is 25 states of the country in this situation, for security reasons the report does not mention which are the most affected entities in the nation.

By the positions of some states in the sense that federal unemployment support will be abolished, due to the economic recovery , it is possible that fraud will drop considerably, however as long as state governments provide this type of support, the possibility that aid may be stolen will remain latent.

You may also like: IRS requests that give you the necessary means to regulate cryptocurrencies