Commissioners not fooled by fraudulent ARPA applications
RIDGWAY-- There were 18 fraudulent
ARPA applications that were filed for aid to small businesses in Elk County.
Elk County Commissioners had to weed through fraudulent applications to find those businesses in Elk County that actually qualified for aid.
It did not take Commissioner Fritz Lecker long to pick up on a trend in these applications. From Prestige Child Care, supposedly located on 275 Meadowbrook Road in Ridgway to the Ditt Plumbing Services at 305 Adams Avenue, a quick check on the computer noted that all of the addresses were up for sale on the Zillow website.
"As a small community, we know the businesses in our townships and boroughs," Lecker said. "And so when we began receiving applications from places we had never heard of, it became a bit of a game to get as much information out of the scammers as possible so that we could forward that information on to the appropriate authorities."
And even though the application for small business had a cap of $5,000, over 18 fraudulent applications were received in the monthlong window the grant funding was open. The scammers were clever, acquiring actual addresses of the Zillow real estate webpage of locations in Elk County, and spoofing local phone numbers for the applications. For example, the Prestige Child Care application listed T.O. Fitch as the property owner after his death in 2020.
There is a sprawling community of victims caught up in a massive series of attacks targeting the nation’s generous Coronavirus aid programs. The more than $5 trillion approved since the start of the pandemic has become a wellspring for criminal activity, allowing fraudsters to siphon money away from hard-hit American workers and businesses who needed the help most.
The exact scope of the fraud targeting federal aid initiatives is unknown, even two years later. With unemployment benefits, however, the theft could be significant. Testifying at a little-noticed congressional hearing this spring, a top watchdog for the Labor Department estimated there could have been at least $163 billion in unemploymentrelated overpayments, a projection that includes wrongly paid sums as well as significant benefits obtained by malicious actors.
So far, the United States has recaptured just over $4 billion of that, according to state workforce data furnished by the Labor Department this March. That amounts to roughly 2.4 percent of the wrongful payments, if the government’s best estimate is accurate, raising the specter that Washington may never get most of the money back.
The Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General has declined to pursue criminal complaints against the fraudsters. With the due diligence of the county commissioners and their staff, they made sure no fake applications made it through to the award round. Now knowing what to look for will aid the county in the future when opening grant funding opportunities.