Fraud By The Numbers Fraud By The Numbers

Life Comes at You Fast: The Role of Whistleblowers in An Era of Constant Change

Jackie DeMar

We hope you have enjoyed this year’s installment of Fraud by the Numbers! I started off the month discussing the developments in enforcement in the year past. Boy, does 2025 feel like a long time ago, particularly for whistleblowers and fraud enforcement where it seems like there is something new to digest every day (even if the cases themselves take years to resolve)! 

In just the past three weeks, we have seen three major developments impacting whistleblowers. First, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued its long-awaited opinion regarding the constitutionality of the qui tam provision in the False Claims Act (FCA). On September 30, 2024, the Middle District of Florida granted the defendants’ Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings in U.S. ex rel. Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates, LLC, finding the qui tam provision unconstitutional under Article II. Finding the qui tam provision unconstitutional under the Appointments Clause (or any other constitutional provision) was unprecedented. The relator appealed the decision to the Eleventh Circuit, and TAF submitted a friend of the court brief in support of the relator and the government. Oral argument was held on December 12, 2025, and the court watch for the decision began. The court issued its decision on September 1, 2026, finding that qui tam relators are not “Officers of the United States” subject to presidential appointment under Article II. The court held that a relator does not occupy a “continuing position established by law” because their role is temporary (lasting only for a single case), non-transferable/personal, and compensated solely via a contingent share rather than a continuing government salary or emolument. It explicitly rejected the theory that the FCA creates an enduring, freestanding “office of relator.” A huge win for whistleblowers and the taxpayers. Alas, the battle is not over. The 11th Circuit Court remanded Zafirov to the district court to consider arguments not addressed in the September 2024 order, including constitutional challenges under the Take Care and Vesting clauses. It remains to be seen if defendants – and the court — will take another swipe at the government’s most effective tool for fighting fraud against the government. 

Days later we all woke up to a media storm that AI will be the end of humankind within a decade. Congress has responded to this potentially existential threat with a flurry of bills aimed at regulating AI and protecting the whistleblowers who are positioned to tell us what’s happening inside the companies developing this technology. 1 The AI Whistleblower Protection Act, introduced by Charles Grassley, alongside co-sponsors including Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) is designed to give employees in the AI space clear legal protections when raising alarms about safety, legal violations, or critical security failures. It applies to current and former employees, and provides whistleblowers with critical protections against a wide range of retaliatory acts, includes a ban on NDAs and forced arbitration, and applies whether whistleblowers report internally or externally. The Safeguarding Consumers from Advertising Misconduct Act (SCAM Act) was introduced by Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), with Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH), David McCormick (R-PA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Katie Britt (R-AL), Chris Coons (D-DE), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) as cosponsors. The SCAM Act would require social media companies to take responsible steps to remove fraudulent advertising from their platforms, including AI generated content. It targets digital fraud, “malvertising,” and impersonation scams by imposing affirmative legal duties on major social media networks and digital ad platforms, holding them liable when they monetize fraudulent advertisements. On the state level, California, New York, and Illinois passed laws aimed at “catastrophic risk” involving AI and demand transparency reports and incident reporting, with California and Illinois including whistleblower protections and anti-retaliation provisions. As the use of AI continues to surge, there seems to be no dispute that we need whistleblowers to expose dangerous and collusive practices to protect our very existence.  

Finally, after lamenting the low number of awards from the CFTC in 2025 earlier this month, on September 14, the CFTC issued a press release announcing that it granted 10 whistleblower awards totaling more than $150 million in final award determinations issued between July and September 2026. While it is definitely a positive development that the backlog of claims is being cleared, the news came with a troubling development. The amount of one award was lowered simply because it was too large, as the CFTC explained large awards may incentivize the filing of frivolous claims and as such lowered the award. The order states that “[i]n addition to encouraging frivolous award claims and causing administrative waste, exceedingly large awards may incentivize individuals to exaggerate the scope, duration, or egregiousness of the alleged misconduct in an attempt to cast a wide net against persons, firms, or even entire industries to see what sticks.” The law creating this program makes no provision for a reduction of an award on this basis. Nor does the recent history of the program support this Commission’s concern.  After the Commission issued an award of nearly $200 million in October 2021, the number of whistleblower tips did increase to 1506 and 1530 in 2022 and 2023, respectively, representing an increase of over 50% from the 961 tips in 2021. Similarly, the number of award applications did jump 98%, from 152 in 2022 to 301 in 2023. However, there is no evidence those awards were non-meritorious or that the whistleblowers “exaggerated” the unlawful conduct they were reporting. The $580 million in total awards granted since the inception of the CFTC’s program only happened as part of more than $5.1 billion in monetary sanctions for unlawful conduct. Large awards show the program is working and encourages future whistleblowers to take the risk to come forward with information about fraud in the commodities markets that the CFTC regulates.   

These three significant developments in just three weeks are indicative of the rapidly changing landscape we track closely at the TAF Coalition. We fully expect more in the weeks and months ahead, and will continue to keep you updated throughout the year on new developments! Please subscribe to our newsletter if you are not already getting our weekly summary of whistleblower-related news. 

Thank you for keeping up with Fraud by the Numbers this month. We’d like to thank again all of our contributors for their time researching, writing, and editing to make this year’s series a success:  
 
• The Anti-Fraud Coalition staff in addition to myself: Grace Swindler (Director of Legal Education) and Devan Eaton (Public Interest Advocacy Fellow)  
• The Anti-Fraud Coalition Members: Kate Scanlan (Keller Grover), Nick Mendoza (Murphy Anderson), Max Voldman (Whistleblower Partners), Christina Milnor (Milnor Law PLLC), Thomas Elrod (Kirby McInerney), Kathleen Gallagher (Gallagher & Lipshutz), Jagir Patel (Phillips & Cohen), Tony Munter (Price Benowitz LLP), Gia Grimm (Joseph Greenwald Laake), Erica Roberts (Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight), Mary Inman (Whistleblower Partners), and Liz Soltan (Whistleblower Partners) 

As we close the 2026 series, we leave you with some highlights to consider from this month’s posts: 

  • From 2020-2025, the SEC alleged in at least 85 enforcement actions that money taken from investors went to luxury purchases. 
  • In fiscal year 2025, DOJ’s FCA statistics broke records in multiple categories, including an overall total of $6.8 billion recovered through FCA settlements and judgments, of which $5.34 billion was recovered through qui tam actions (though this number includes money not yet recovered, as the cases are on appeal). 
  • DOJ and the U.S. Postal Service announced the first award under the Antitrust Whistleblower Rewards Program: $1 million to an individual whose information led to a deferred prosecution agreement and $3.28 million criminal fine against EBLOCK Corporation, an online used-vehicle auction platform. 
  • DOJ continues to focus on nursing home fraud: a 2025 Report on Combatting Elder Fraud and Abuse revealed the Department initiated 283 enforcement actions involving over 600 defendants charged with stealing or alleged to have stolen over $2 billion from over 1 million victims as well as the government. 
  • New York has recovered approximately $590 million since expanding its FCA to expressly cover tax fraud in 2010. 
  • Since Fiscal Year 2024, data miners have filed more than 45% of all qui tam complaints. 
  • The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts recovered the most fraudulently stolen funds and paid the most in relator’s share in the country, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania handled the most cases in 2025. 
  • For 2027, the administration is seeking about $477 million to fund the DOJ Civil Division, which will fund 1,166 attorneys along with supporting personnel – however much of those resources go towards defending lawsuits and elsewhere, not to funding FCA enforcement. Whistleblowers are necessary to supplement scare government resources. 
  • The combined value of the Medicare Advantage-related False Claims Act settlements announced by the Department of Justice so far in 2026 is a whopping $1.228 billion. 
  • The CFTC granted just three whistleblower awards in 2025, totaling $4.6 million; the associated enforcement actions for these awards collected over $16 million in sanctions (but it looks like that will improve in 2026!). 
  • Customs and Border Patrol, the entity that collects and enforces customs duties, assessed over $2.1 billion in commercial trade penalties in fiscal year 2025-2026.   
  • Depending on how the private credit market is defined, it contains roughly $3 trillion in underregulated funds. 
  • DOJ’s Corporate Criminal Whistleblower Pilot Program continues to receive hundreds of tips and recently expanded the scope of the Program to include trade, tariff and customs fraud, and federal immigration law violations, among others.   
  • According to our data since 2022, there have been 189 PPP fraud settlements/judgments totaling more than $623 million. 
  • The highest known relators’ award in 2025 was for the relators who received $60.38 million, or 17.25%, of the $350 million settlement with Walgreens. 
  • Total qui tam recoveries in FY 2025 reached $5.34 billion, with government-declined cases accounting for $2.29 billion, or 42.8% of that total. 
  • In September 2026, Wired reported that the CFTC had opened at least three more insider trading investigations into Polymarket contracts involving Joe Biden’s pardons, the Iran conflict, and Google. 
  • Since May 2021, jurisdictions with state False Claims Acts have reported collecting more than $2 billion through these anti-fraud laws. 
  • In his July 14, 2026 report “Fraud in the Digital Age,” Jonathan Fisher KC counts 774 UK individuals making protected disclosures to four US reward regulators (the IRS, SEC, CFTC and FinCEN) between 2012 and 2023. 

This piece was written by Jackie DeMar the President and CEO of The Anti-Fraud Coalition 

1 See e.g. AI Whistleblower Protection Act, Safeguarding Consumers from Advertising Misconduct Act, AI Emergency Button Act, Future of AI Innovation Act, Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, NO FAKES Act, DEFIANCE Act, Spot the Fakes Act, Algorithmic Accountability Act, Preventing Algorithmic Collusion Act, and the Federal AI Governance and Transparency Act.