These kinds of vague rumours ("they have evidence" is weasel words) are used to legitimize the development of invasive programs (and software) that profile people; see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand... that affected tens of thousands of people (causing children to be removed from their parents, divorces, suicides, etc), mostly justified because of a small group of people defrauding the benefits scheme. The total cost of setting this right is in the billions and increasing, many times more than whatever they saved on fraud.
they have evidence that there is fraud rings of people outside the US posing as citizens and collecting medicare and other welfare.
They'll release that evidence right about the same time they release all the "evidence" that Giuliani had about election fraud. Which they've promised to release hundreds of times before. But never have. Because it doesn't exist.
Are there people outside the U.S. gaming the system? Sure. Are they "rings" or "gangs" or whatever scary name they're using this week? Based on past performance, I have zero faith we'll see any evidence.
> Are they "rings" or "gangs" or whatever scary name they're using this week?
As someone who is very into the "scambaiting" hobby of hunting down identity thieves, phone call scams, etc I would imagine they would look something like these operations you see in India or Russia where you get have an office full of professional thieves calling elderly people and scamming them out of their bank accounts, harvesting data or getting them to sign up for useless subscriptions. In 2023 alone there was $43 billion lost from identity theft. There was $200 billion in fraud from the various covid hardship assistance programs. These programs are huuuge and they have ballooned beyond what is logical in the past few years. Even democrats talk frequently about medicare fraud.
Without commenting on this specific situation, you're very naive to think government/regulatory policies are not exploited in systematic ways by rings/gangs. Have a look at cum-ex dividend fraud in Germany, GST refunds on gold in Australia, carousel/missing trader VAT fraud in the EU, ETS carbon credit fraud in the EU, etc. All multi to tens of billion dollar frauds that were systematically exploited by rings/gangs.
Yes, there’s always fraud but 40% of nearly a trillion dollars a year is an incredibly high number - like the entire Nigerian GDP! It’s simply not possible for that to be happening with a regularly audited public service which routinely finds and successfully prosecutes much smaller fraud operations. That kind of effort would involve hundreds or thousands of people and one of them would slip up.
This is a classic misdirection: fixing Medicare means dealing with the world-record inefficiency of the American healthcare system and paying a little more in taxes. They can’t say that because it’s unpopular with the rich donor class, and if they say services will be cut it’ll be very unpopular with their elderly base, so instead they point to something everyone hates and pretend that it’s big enough to solve the fundamental mismatch.
I also heard tell about underpants gnomes that steal your underpants at night. A lot of people are saying it. Could be anywhere from 1 million to 10 million pairs per year, nobody knows, but we're looking into it.
This is an attack on the government without a legal basis. Evidence can be submitted and process can be followed, he and his team are doing neither are opening themselves up to severe legal consequences. They should research Michael Cohen and Giuliani.
These people have our information, right now, in some drive in their backpack. This will be a scandal for years to come if the nation survives this.
