Over the course of the pandemic, we examined so many stories of people that were found to be defrauding the COVID relief programs that I lost count. The Paycheck Protection Program was one of the funds most commonly plundered. The recurring question during that entire period was what the eventual total of all the losses would end up being. Now the Associated Press has dug into some of the details. We still don’t have a final figure and likely never will. But it’s definitely in the hundreds of billions… with a “B.”

Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.

Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.

All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

The AP’s analysis concluded that thieves fraudulently filed claims worth more than $280 billion from the relief funds. On top of that, another $123 billion was “wasted or misspent.” That added up to more than $400 billion, or roughly ten percent of the total COVID relief money that threw our nation trillions of dollars further into debt.

The analysis concludes that the government “conducted too little oversight” of the process and “instituted too few restrictions on applicants.” The entire system was simply too easy to scam and the scammers lined up by the tens of thousands. They further expect to find considerably more because the investigation into the dodgy claims is still ongoing.

Some of the “mistakes” that were made added up to quite a bit of cash on top of all of the blatant theft. The report found that when the IRS was sending out stimulus checks all around the country, they delivered them to the intended recipients 99% of the time. That may sound like a pretty good track record, but the one percent that wound up being sent to “ineligible individuals” added up to almost eight billion dollars.

What the government doesn’t seem to be admitting is that the methods they are using to catch the fraudsters and try to recoup some of the cash are never going to bring everyone to justice. They’re looking at the suspiciously large payouts and finding companies with records of dubious activity in a “Do Not Pay” database and various sets of fraud indicators. But the scams were so easy and obvious that a lot of normal people who might never otherwise have considered committing a crime might have been tempted to submit some more modest claims. Similarly, the unemployment systems in all of the states were overwhelmed and received federal funding to keep them afloat. Tracking down all of those claims will likely never be possible.

And what did we really get for all of that money and debt? History will be the judge, but I don’t believe that our government will be viewed kindly in retrospect. And the public’s confidence in Washington’s competency will only be further eroded. Rather than handing it over to scammers, you can get a much better and more secure deal for yourself if you choose to sign up for one of our VIP membership programs. And you’ll keep more of your own cash if you use the promo code “SAVEAMERICA” when signing up.