Washington State Loses "Hundreds Of Millions" To Nigerian Unemployment Claims Fraud Scheme

This country is so fricked with stupidity.

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I saw something on this the other day. I could be wrong and while Washington was the state they hit the hardest, they also hit up on people from.. I think I saw 12 other states. Think about it for a second. How easy was it for them to steal millions from people. That's sad.

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It is. I just looked up elsewhere
LINK https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/

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“The primary state targeted so far is Washington, while there is also evidence of attacks in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Florida,” the Secret Service said in an alert sent to law enforcement officials across the country last week. “It is extremely likely every state is vulnerable to this scheme and will be targeted if they have not been already.”

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It is one thing when it happens to unsuspecting or gullible people, but to a damn state? They didn't even have to convince them to go buy Walmart gift cards or send the payments by Western Union.
Nah, they convinced those idiots to send them actual unemployment checks.

It will be interesting to see how much effort the Secret Service, Feds, and State officials put into recovering money lost to fraud when it is "their" money and "they" are on the hook for it. I suspect that the usual, "Our hands are tied..." line won't suffice for them.

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but to a damn state

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It doesn't really surprise me. I am being serious, its probably easy to scam governments, but people don't try often because "its the government".

I bet when it comes to local governments, I would say that there are more local governments than not that employees at least 1 person who is scamming a department within their government so I am sure its just as easy to be on the outside looking in to scam a government body.

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“Nobody was more shocked at the scale of the fraud than I was."
said diversity hire Mbuto Ngseo of Accounts Payable.

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But how will the scammers get that money out of Nigeria with all the instability?

From the link:

“This makes me the most angry, and the most upset — that we need to delay payments to Washingtonians who need the benefits,” LeVine said adding that "we need to also build in more time for analysis. So going forward, we want to set expectations that we will add an additional one to two days to our processing time."

Is anyone else concerned that the woman in charge of the ESD in Washington, the position responsible for insuring things like this don't happen, is the person who is now leading efforts to correct the mess?

Surprised there weren't checks and balances in place. I sell to the state police and every little thing needs to be documented.