Thursday, May 12, 2022

Dear Michigan UIA: Maybe You Could Stop Making Fraud So Damn Easy?

Yet another Stupid Criminal busted for stealing over $700,000 from Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency. Stupid because he was dumb enough to post about it on social media.

The Detroit News:  Farmington Hills man who flaunted wealth sentenced in fraud scheme

Too bad he didn't claim the fraud was just reparations payments, maybe he would have walked then.

He apparently also had inside help at the Post Office for stealing mail and debit cards and then decided to go direct to UIA to ply his fraud directly.

The problem is Michigan's UIA among many other insanely open security holes, pays out benefits on debit cards - cards which are ridiculously easy to use without needing to show any identification and sent by mail apparently to any damn address a fraudster may desire.

At least with  a check or payments direct to a bank account there's at least some paper trail to ascertain the identity of the recipient and match the payment to the name of the actual recipient.   Not so much with a debit card.

UIA just doesn't seem to care much if it as an agency is enabling fraud by passing out debit cards to just about any claimant created online without even verifying their address and comparing it to wage reports of the actual worker.

That's hundreds of millions lost to fraud from the Unemployment Insurance Agency in Michigan alone, and over $300 Billion nationally in fraudulent UI payments - enough to send every American citizen a whole other payment of $1,400 or more and instead it went to fraudsters like this idiot and to scammers in Russia, China and Africa.

Quit making it so easy for criminals to commit this type of fraud.

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