US:Nearly $100 billion stolen from Covid relief funds

In US, Criminals have stolen close to $100 billion in pandemic relief funds. the Secret Service said on Tuesday. The stolen funds were diverted by fraudsters from the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and a another program set up to dole out unemployment assistance funds nationwide. The estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, said Roy Dotson, the agency's national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, in an interview.While roughly 3% of the $3.4 trillion dispersed, the amount stolen from pandemic benefits programmes shows “the sheer size of the pot is enticing to the criminals,” Dotson said.

The Secret Service says it has more than 900 active criminal investigations into pandemic fraud, with cases in every state, and 100 people have been arrested so far. The Justice Department said that its fraud section had prosecuted over 150 defendants in more than 95 criminal cases and had seized over $75 million in cash proceeds derived from fraudulently obtained Paycheck Protection Programme funds, as well as numerous real estate properties and luxury items purchased with the proceeds. One of the best-known programmes created through the March 2020 CARES Act, PPP offered low-interest, forgivable loans to small businesses struggling to meet payroll and other expenses during pandemic-related shutdowns.Authorities have now prioritised the exploitation of pandemic-related relief because the federal funding through the CARES Act attracted the attention of individuals and organised criminal networks worldwide.