$100M in Jobless Claims Went to Inmates | Hacker News Reader

$100M in Jobless Claims Went to Inmates

krebsonsecurity.com

36 pointswglb18 comments

As the article immediately states, that $100 million is a tiny amount of unemployment fraud, and money going to inmates is not a vital part of the article. Why is it the headline? $100 millim going to inmates is more shocking than California had $11 billion in unemployment fraud last year?

And California's 11 billion is probably just a fraction of all the unemployment fraud across all the states as this has been a rampant problem. Then add on to that the small business loan fraud, and we're easily at 100+ billion levels across the country. These numbers will be more clear once the tax return filings and small business loan audits start happening.

The various stimulus packages have led to fraud at the scale never been seen before, and the cost of amounts more than the entire National Science Foundation budget (8.5 billion) and National Institutes of Health budget (42.5 billion).

Almost feels like a bait-and-switch.

The article is actually interesting vis-à-vis ID.me stuff. It is unclear to me why they decided to lead/title with the jail thing, when it isn't explored, in the body of the article.

Better article title:

"States are now turning to ID.me to prevent jobless fraud claims."

Is that a lot? People who want to whine about these types of errors need to show that making it more accurate is worth the trouble. It's been long-known that compliance with federal income taxes is only about 88%, dollar-wise, but there isn't a flood of intentionally misleading blogging about that, even though the amount at stake is greater.

I'm immediately suspicious of any article that doesn't seem to understand the difference between jail and prison and uses the two interchangeably.

Still a small fraction of the at least $11B in fraud CA alone paid out https://thehill.com/homenews/news/535796-california-official...

ID.Me is a step in the right direction but I think articles like these underscore the need for a federal digital ID (maybe a card like they have in Germany and other countries) where I can authenticate who I am quickly and securely.

Obviously there is the potential for abuse (which should be mitigated), but current system is just such a patchwork.

The prison system is a worthless (unless corporate) racket (prisoners and family), double billing both external and internal sources, using 1998 activeX websites in 2013 to even try to deal or communicate that no one could even use (particularly from linux), and general malfeasance that I can't believe I witnessed with a friend going down for a DUI into that.

Did he do wrong? Yes. Is this right? NO! Not to any self-respecting IT person, which he was. The whole thing is government and corporate nepotism. The drama to even send him some books to read was absurd.

I had to tell him, I couldn't figure out how to work with communicating with him without installing windows xp. It was typical silly government giving grants to their cousins just because they could, hiring some scumbags developers, and with prisoners, why bother? I did some research on who ran the communications systems, and the most crap-bag company you can imagine did, at least for Arizona. I presume now this is common.

That whole system needs burned down from the bottom up, including the lobbyists in the pyre.

Fraud calls seem to be the favorite pastime for Russian inmates. They typically target individuals though. They're not supposed to have cellphones but they bribe their way to them, purchase some personal details and typically pose as bank security officers.

ID.me is dogshit. Just another technocratic hurdle to dissuade people from getting what they're owed. Looking forward to the inevitable hack.

If you're prevented from working a real job, you should receive jobless benefits.

How long until id.me gets hacked and all those scanned licenses get released...

Is this an ad? It reads like an ad. I imagine that imprisonment and joblessness is highly correlated. At what point in time is this illegal? A lot of people in jail are not convicted, and a lot more are not convicted of felonies.

Paul Graham's Submarine [1] essay seems relevant. There's a few other articles about ID.me that have come out today according to a quick google search.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

According to https://edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Eligibility.htm in order to qualify for unemployment benefits in California, you must be "physically able to work, available for work, and ready and willing to accept work immediately"--obviously that can't be the case if you're incarcerated.

In the recent cycle of articles about CA unemployment fraud, it's been widely reported that inmates involved (not necessarily perpetrating, some just had their names used) in this fraud were from all around the country.

Does anyone actually believe this?

It's like, I don't know, a thousand times more likely that someone not in prison was scamming the system and one of the easiest ways to identify that some claims were fraudulent after the fact is to check them against databases of very ineligible people that might not have been checked in the approval filter. "Currently imprisoned people" sounds like one of the most likely lists, since long dead people are probably somewhat more likely to be filtered out on the first try.

"People currently in prison" is probably also a fairly easy list to hit since there are public records indicating who has been sentenced and the people in question are way, way less likely to be tipped off that a fraudulent claim has been made in their name since they are largely cut off from the world.

Fraud happened, and surely some people in prison were able to hear about the increased UI benefits and apply, but I have a very hard time believing the headline.

This is very believable, because information in prison spreads instantly and everyone knows what everyone else is doing. One inmate figures out a way to make money, and sells this information for other favors, and soon it becomes "viral".

Wherein, to save $100M, we pay much more to a private company[1], and in the process sidestep the question of a federal ID database by instead selling it out to a private vendor.

I can't wait to hear when they get hacked, and they have to give out free ID monitoring for a year to make up for it.

[1] VA alone pays $12M/year: https://www.fedhealthit.com/2019/05/va-awards-62m-task-for-i...

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