Unemployment benefits also received dead and not yet born

The Department of Efficiency of the Government (Dog), which runs it Elon Muskrevealed irregularities in the payment system for unemployed benefits. They have discovered thousands of cases where the recipients of unemployment benefits were over 115, under the age of five or had birth dates in the future, report New York Times.

Musk wrote on the X platform: “Your tax money went to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future! It’s so crazy that I had to read several times before I realized what was going on. « 

Among the most striking examples was an individual who received as much as $ 41,000 in social benefits and his birthday was listed in 2154. Musk’s team is referred to as probably false people, but as said by the newspaper, the situation is probably more complicated than it seems at first glance.

Irregularities are expected to begin at the beginning of the pandemic, when the number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits has increased dramatically. The emergency assistance program adopted in the first term of the President of Trump is expected to be highly susceptible to fraud, with as much as 15 percent of the claims of fraud, often using stolen identities.

In order to protect the victims of identity theft, the US Ministry of Labor has encouraged state agencies that manage unemployment benefits to create « pseudo claims ». These claims were designed to associate real fraud cases with fictional persons, which allowed fraud.

Thus, unrealistic records, such as recipients of compensation, over 115, or those with birth dates in the future have been created. The purpose of these records was to preserve fraud data while protecting the right identities. Musk’s team thus probably discovered already known fraud that were documented this way, reports Nyt.