The new 2024 annual report from the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force summarizes law enforcement efforts to combat pandemic-era fraud, providing further evidence of long held concerns about how the roughly $5 trillion total pandemic relief was exploited by bad actors. Two years ago, The New York Timespublished an interactive chart showing what industry sectors received the funds.
Yet, this marks only a small fraction of the estimated fraud stemming from COVID-19 relief. For example, an Associated Press investigation estimated $280 billion in relief funds were stolen by fraudsters.
Published by the Department of Justice on Tuesday, the report summarizes the efforts of the task force and its partners to investigate, prosecute, and recover funds in the myriad fraud schemes that exploited the COVID-19 relief programs implemented during the pandemic, such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
For example, DOJ report found $2 billion in losses associated with criminal pandemic fraud spread across 3,500 individual cases. Some of the most fantastic instances of fraud include a Florida defendant who used more than $7 million in relief funds to purchase an estate and two luxury vehicles, and a VA nurse who filed more than 220 false applications for unemployment insurance, netting herself more than $3.5 million.
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