Throughout the pandemic, unemployment benefit programs across the country have been targeted by criminals at home and abroad seeking to defraud American taxpayers. According to NBC News, “Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in American Covid benefits.” Law enforcement officials and private experts told Yahoo News and NBC News that pandemic unemployment benefit fraud is “the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the U.S.” While the federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic unemployment relief has been stolen, credible estimates range from $87 billion to $400 billion.