The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Fraud Crisis

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The COVID-19 pandemic prompted governments all over the world to temporarily increase social welfare programs. With all the extra money, these federal cash assistance schemes became a target for fraudsters. "It's a humanitarian crisis as well as a fraud crisis," says Linda Miller, former executive director of the pandemic response accountability committee.

Russia’s arrest of a Wall Street Journal correspondent is heading toward a diplomatic crisis—and will certainly chill foreign reporting in the country. It is startlingly easy to siphon money out of America’s social-welfare programmes, but devilishly difficult to thwart those efforts without threatening needy families. And ChatGPT may make things up, but it does so fluently in more than 50 languages.

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