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When the US government began offering financial aid to Americans struggling to cope with a pandemic-fueled economic collapse in 2020, the Department of Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged Americans to be ever more vigilant about their personal information. COVID-19 scams seemed to be everywhere, and for government agencies, it became difficult to ensure that all the money it was sending out actually made it to the citizens most in need of aid—and not into the hands of bad actors.
It’s now estimated that hundreds of billions in COVID relief funds were stolen, Bloomberg reported, with no way of knowing the true cost of the losses.
It has perhaps never been clearer to the federal government how impactful it could be during times of emergency to already have trusted nationwide digital identification verification systems in place.
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