Half of the pandemic's unemployment money may have been stolen | Hacker News Reader

Half of the pandemic's unemployment money may have been stolen

axios.com

26 pointsmgh26 comments

There's no evidence offered to support the click bait headline, other than the obviously self-interested opinion of the CEO of a company selling a solution to prevent fraud:

"Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a service that tries to prevent this kind of fraud, tells Axios that America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims. As much as 50% of all unemployment monies might have been stolen, he says."

>Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a service that tries to prevent this kind of fraud, tells Axios that America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims. As much as 50% of all unemployment monies might have been stolen, he says.

Are there people without an obvious conflict of interest saying this, too?

Lazy reporting, imo. I don't doubt there's a real fraud issue, but basing a headline on one guy's "might have been" figure when that same guy stands to gain financially from saying it... yikes

> Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a service that tries to prevent this kind of fraud, tells Axios…

LOL. I believe we’re all smart enough here to know this is a kind of submarine [0].

[0]: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Would a federal digital currency help reduce this kind of fraud? Would it lead to easier fraud?

I don't know if we'll ever see a truly bipartisan digital currency in the form we know it now. Fraud prevention and similar services exist in the US government to prevent extreme exploitation by bad actor businesses, which rules out the support of many people in the government who could work to create any such currency. Protection procedures exist only from government institutions, and these range from hard to completely impossible to make with a cryptocurrency or similar systems.

That said, a digital currency (as well as secure identification) would certainly reduce things like credit card fraud or identity theft. So maybe it balances out? This is really difficult to answer definitively lol

This kind of fraud is more related to the lack of a trustworthy digital identity than to digital currency.

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