Both Jazz and I have written about COVID relief fraud a number of times. The actual amount of money involved is still not known but some official estimates have put it as high as $100 billion, though the actual number is certainly much higher.

Lots of individual fraudsters have been identified and over 100 have been charged but many of the fraudsters will never face consequences. Case in point, NBC News reports that a group of Chinese hackers are suspected of having stolen about $20 million in COVID relief.

Hackers linked to the Chinese government stole at least $20 million in U.S. Covid relief benefits, including Small Business Administration loans and unemployment insurance funds in over a dozen states, according to the Secret Service.

The theft of taxpayer funds by the Chengdu-based hacking group known as APT41 is the first instance of pandemic fraud tied to foreign, state-sponsored cybercriminals that the U.S. government has acknowledged publicly, but may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts…

“It would be crazy to think this group didn’t target all 50 states,” said Roy Dotson, national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator for the Secret Service, who also acts as a liaison to other federal agencies probing Covid fraud…

“I’ve never seen them target government money before,” said John Hultquist, the head of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant. “That would be an escalation.”…

The agency said it has been able to recover about half of the stolen $20 million.

Officially this is illegal but APT41 is usually busy collecting personal information on American citizens almost certainly at the behest of the government. So there’s really no chance these hackers are operating without the tacit permission of the state. Maybe stealing this money was the equivalent of a Christmas bonus.

As for the total scope of COVID fraud, NBC mentions various estimates as high as $500 billion.

The Labor Department Office of Inspector General has reported an improper payment rate of roughly 20% for the $872.5 billion in federal pandemic unemployment funds, though the true cost of the fraud is likely higher, administration officials from multiple agencies say…

“Whether it’s 350, 400 or 500 billion, at this point, the horse is out of the barn,” said Linda Miller, the former deputy executive director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, the federal government’s Covid relief fraud watchdog.

It’s almost certainly the biggest fraud in US history and very little of the money will be returned. There are still more than 1,000 cases under investigation but whatever happens it’s going to be a small fraction of the total fraud.

The Washington Post published a story just last week about another COVID relief fraudster who escaped to Nigeria and then returned and got caught:

On a perfect spring day at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Abidemi Rufai arrived at the international terminal ready for the long journey back home to Nigeria.

On his wrist, Rufai, 44, wore an expensive Cartier watch. Around his neck, he wore an 18-karat gold chain with a lion pendant. As he approached the check-in desk for his business class seat on the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight, Rufai had seven pieces of luggage, three smartphones, and seven debit and credit cards.

It was May 2021. A year earlier, Rufai had pulled off a spectacular heist of U.S. taxpayer money…

The details paint a portrait of how a seasoned identity thief hit the jackpot when covid funds began to flow, preying on a tremendous amount of money that was suddenly thrust into the economy in a way that made it very easy to steal. His previous efforts at defrauding the U.S. government amounted to less than $100,000 over three years, according to federal prosecutors. But in a span of six months in 2020, he was able to swipe more than half a million dollars, prosecutors said. He was one of the most prolific thieves but joined hundreds of others, both international and domestic, who overwhelmed government officials trying to protect billions of dollars.

His story ends with an arrest but an unnamed federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the Chinese fraud case told NBC News, “A lot of these criminals, we’ll never be able to indict and locate.”