It looks like fraudsters and con artists are out in full force in Los Angeles after the fires there a couple of months ago.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has received 270,000 applications from purported homeowners in the recent L.A. fires — though only abut 13,000 homes were destroyed.
A FEMA official gave the staggering figure — more than twenty times the number of eligible applicants — as concerns about fraudulent applications continue to plague the agency, more than two months after the fire.
As Breitbart News has reported, many displaced residents had tried applying for FEMA relief, only to find that someone else had already applied in their name and with their address, locking them out of the system.
FEMA attempts to make relief funds easy to apply for, but the downside is that fraudsters can more easily take advantage of the system. A FEMA official said that problem was a major reason for closing applications at the end of the month, instead of extending them for a full year, as Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) requested.
There's more at the link.
I'm not surprised that a bunch of con artists are trying to profit from others' troubles. It happens almost every time there's a disaster of any kind. However, I am surprised that so many applications have been made. Twenty-plus applicants for every premises damaged or destroyed? That's chutzpah of a very high order . . .
Full marks to FEMA for catching so many of the applications before they were processed. Unfortunately, sorting out legitimate applications from the fraudulent ones is likely to take months, if not a year or more; and while FEMA is doing that, it can't make funds available to those who really need them to clear their land and begin the process of rebuilding.
Perhaps we could arrange for all those filing fraudulent applications to be sentenced to a few years working on wildfire crews, under the supervision of California's corrections department? Alternatively, we could put them to work on homeless encampment clearance projects and landscape rehabilitation. Make the punishment fit the crime!
Peter
13 comments:
It is apparently very easy to file such fraud. What is the cost of the fraud, and preventing the fraud? This is why penal colonies were invented. Likely it is a small number of people. Catch them and permanently, for the rest of their lives, sentence them to hard labor. Make them earn their daily bread and the cost of their upkeep. Our country is broke due to people like them, it is time for restitution. (Talking white collar here, I know violent criminals would be too difficult to control.)
And the really serious fraud such as USAID and ACTBLUE, the same in spades.
That's 257,000 people who should be jailed or fined significantly and identified as felons.
There is some kind of ethnic Mafia in California since the 1930s, at least.
Or just lock them up for a few years. It is attempted fraud after all. Intent to Defraud the Gov out of Millions of dollars should bring on something more than a "Don't do that again" response, after all.
I will disagree that it's chutzpah, unless they all knew there would be that many "oversubscriptions."
No, instead I think this is lessons learned from COVID: submitting a false claim is likely to go through, and even if you're "caught" there are no consequences.
Or put it another way, this is just getting more of what we had subsidized.
It's a sure bet that many of those fraudsters have connections within the bureaucracies. Perhaps DoGE can monitor bank accounts to spot kickbacks.
CA requires fingerprints to get a drivers license so it shouldn't be that hard to stop fraud.
The solution is simple. Hand out meaningful painful punishment for fraudsters. Until that happens there is essentially no reason to not engage in fraud.
I hate to suggest it, even to think about it makes me ill, but these "fraudsters" mightn't be people within the very bowels of FEMA itself.
I am not surprised either but I wish that I was.
Unless, and Until, there are serious consequences for such attempted fraud, it will continue.
People need to be jailed at hard labor for such attempted theft of taxpayer funds
Sadly, human nature rears it's ugly head.... they could sneak away from firecrews, and it's not a constant, thank Yah... maybe a year or two in Gitmo would do them good. No one to steal from there, at the worst time possible.....
I suspect that its either a small group applying multiple times or an organization. I'm guessing the easiest way to get scammers out quickly would be to ditch any applications that have foreign bank account info. Ie money going to nigeria, asia, camen islands etc.
Exile1981
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