On Tuesday’s edition of Fox News’ “Will Cain Country,” Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo said that “the federal government simply doesn’t have enough resources, doesn’t have enough investigators, enough prosecutors, and enough researchers to get to the bottom” many fraud schemes and the federal government will “have to significantly scale up these efforts if they want to deter fraud in the future.”
While discussing fraud in California, Rufo said, [relevant remarks begin around 38:00] “[T]he problem for the federal government, for JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force, is that there’s so much fraud, it’s going to be hard to actually unravel a lot of these schemes, because the federal government simply doesn’t have enough resources, doesn’t have enough investigators, enough prosecutors, and enough researchers to get to the bottom of it.”
He added, “I have been, frankly, disappointed with the pace, with the scale and scope of the federal counteractions against” Somali fraudsters, and said, “Federal prosecutors told us, kind of under shield of anonymity, that they simply didn’t have enough resources to prosecute all of the Somali fraud, they had only started to prosecute or investigate the very tip of the iceberg. And even in the cases where we did see prosecutions, convictions, jail time, in one case, recently, a Somali fraudster who stole millions of dollars from taxpayers was only sentenced to one year in prison. And so, if you are a fraudster, you’re going to think, 98, 99% of the time, I’m probably going to get away with the crime, and that 1% of the time where I might get caught, maybe I’ll serve a year, maybe two years in prison, but you’re still walking away with millions or tens of millions of dollars at the end of the day. And, so, the ugly reality, and this is a criticism, frankly, of the federal government right now, under President Trump, is that they’re going to have to significantly scale up these efforts if they want to deter fraud in the future.”
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