Senior Secret Service official to lead crackdown on COVID-19 scams

The U.S. Secret Service announced on Tuesday that it has chosen a senior agency official to lead the agency’s efforts on the crackdown on COVID-19 financial scams.

The agency said Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roy Dotson of the Jacksonville, Fla., field office will serve as the National Pandemic Fraud Recovery Coordinator.

In a statement the agency said he will oversee “efforts across multiple ongoing Secret Service investigations into the fraudulent use of COVID-19 relief applications, with stolen benefits nearing $100 billion.”

The agency said the release of money through the CARES Act — the $2 trillion relief package then-President Trump signed into law in March 2020 — attracted the attention of individuals and organized criminal groups throughout the world, adding that the exploitation of funds allocated during the pandemic is “an investigative authority” for the agency and its partners.

Those efforts include matters linking back to unemployment insurance, the U.S. Small Business Administration loan and grant programs and other benefit initiatives.

Dotson will collaborate with financial institutions and money services businesses, U.S. attorneys offices and other federal agencies regarding matters involving large-scale seizures of illegally-obtained COVID-19 relief funds.

The Secret Service has already recovered more than $1.2 billion worth of relief funds that individuals illicitly obtained, and returned more than $2.3 billion in illegally-obtained funds, according to the agency.

One hundred individuals have been arrested in connection to the investigations, according to the Secret Service.

During an interview with CNN, Dotson said the agency “has seen enormous fraud” related to unemployment benefits and Small Business Association loans.

“Individuals are opportunistic, so when the federal funding from the CARES Act was released, they obviously pivoted to that and began targeting that — those programs,” Dotson said.

Dotson said the crackdown is aiming to “maximize our investigative impact” and “recover as much as we can” in funds that were illicitly obtained, according to CNN.

More than 900 active criminal investigations pertaining to coronavirus-related financial fraud under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service remain open, according to Dotson. He told the network that he wants the probes to have a larger impact, which will require clawing back large amounts of funds and, through coordination with the DOJ, jailing perpetrators.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career as far as the magnitude and the scope,” Dotson told CNN, pointing to the COVID-19 financial swindling.

Asked by CNN’s Erica Hill why he thinks scammers saw the pandemic funding as a ripe opportunity to swindle money, Dotson cited the availability to file online applications and the large number of identity-theft victims involved.

“I think the availability to file online applications made it ease of use, and then the use of individuals, there is numerous identity-theft victims that are involved in these cases,” Dotson said.

“The primary thing that we saw was that individuals and criminal organizations could readily file these online applications and receive these benefits rather quickly,” he added.