When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the U.S. government spent an unprecedented amount of money to prop up the economy and aid Americans whose daily lives had come to a sudden halt. Between 2020 and 2021, President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden signed a combined six laws shelling out over $5 trillion – helping small businesses guarantee paychecks and paying for COVID-19 tests. The money also went toward health care and housing support , and to things like emergency food programs for children going without free school lunches.

A lot of the money, it turns out, went to fraudsters.

Five years on, the total amount of pandemic relief fraud remains unknown, with estimates ranging from hundreds of billions of dollars to $1 trillion. While federal investigators, private experts, and

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