At least 25 states across the country are highly vulnerable to these practices due to their poor security measures.
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Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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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 to a large section of the population, it has also been to criminals.
According to the Axios portal, approximately half of the unemployment assistance may have been stolen by crime. In economic terms, the stolen represents $ 400,000 million dollars. The study explains that this has been possible through fraud.
The way fraud happens 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, they do it through debit cards, a situation that enables them to get money out of 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 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 benefit 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 national security issue due to the complexity of how the money could have been moved to other latitudes.
Other expert firms on the subject such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions ruled something similar to ID.me, stating that at least 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 owned 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 are 25 states in the country in this situation, for security reasons the report does not mention which are the most affected entities in the nation.
Due to 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 decrease considerably, however, as long as the state governments provide this type of support, the possibility of that aid can be stolen.
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