Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

In early 2020, the global pandemic plunged economies around the world into a short but severe

recession. In developed countries, jobless rates soared into double digits,

and governments around the world spent trillions of dollars to aid those affected. The IMF estimated

in May 2020 that $9 trillion in fiscal support had been allocated to pandemic relief by governments globally. In the United

States before leaving office, Donald Trump approved $3.2 trillion of emergency aid, and Joe Biden

authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion the next year, according to the pandemic

response accountability committee. About one-fifth of that money has yet to be paid out,

meaning that over $4 trillion has been spent in the United States so far. The U. The US Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress

that this was the largest rescue package in American history, at no point in the past had

so much federal emergency aid been injected into the US economy at such a speed.

The enormous scale of that package hides some multi-billion dollar mistakes.

An associated press analysis that came out this week found that fraudsters had likely stolen

more than $280 billion in government relief funding, while another

$123 billion had been wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss makes up 10% of the $4.2 trillion the

U.S. government has so far dispersed in pandemic relief aid.

There's a long history of fraudsters taking advantage of disasters to fill their boots.

A 2021 paper in the journal Computers and Security highlights how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, thousands of

fraudulent websites sprung up, appealing for humanitarian donations, and local citizens received

scam emails soliciting personal information to receive possible payouts or government relief efforts.

Similar scams and attacks were seen after earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador, after Hurricane

Harvey and after the bushfires in Australia too.

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