The Secret Service has “hundreds” of investigations into international criminal syndicates suspected of stealing taxpayers’ money from pandemic relief programs, the agency’s top coronavirus official told Congress on Tuesday.
But he and other federal investigators also said they can’t yet say how much of the trillions of dollars paid out in relief was fraudulent.
“We are nowhere near a full understanding of the fraud landscape,” said Hannibal “Mike” Ware, the inspector general at the Small Business Administration, which doled out more than $1.3 trillion in loans.
Estimates by outside analysts run deep into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with perhaps $250 billion alone stolen from the $900 billion in pandemic unemployment benefits.