Fraud By The Numbers Series

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 20

    Fraud has been with us for as long as people have used their imagination to fool their fellows with falsity. Huge amounts of money have been lost to fraud. In the modern era, since governments spend more than almost anyone else, governments are also among the biggest victims of fraud. For example, under its principal…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 19

    What do such recognizable companies as T-Mobile, ChatGPT, Chick-fil-A, Google Fi, and MailChimp all have in common? These companies (alongside many others) have all been victims of major data breaches so far this year.[1] In an increasingly digital landscape, the threat of cyberattacks has emerged as a pressing concern for businesses and investors alike, carrying…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 18

    The False Claims Act has become an increasingly important tool in the government’s fight against evasions of customs duties and tariffs.  And qui tam lawsuits are fundamental to that effort.  As demonstrated by a recently-published study of settlements of customs-related False Claims Act cases, the government has recovered more than $220 million over the past…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 17

    As the old adage goes, “Where money flows, fraud follows.” This has certainly been true in the cryptocurrency world. According to CoinMarketCap.com, the value of all existing cryptocurrency is over a trillion dollars as of September 15, 2023, with around $508 billion of that being attributed to Bitcoin. The size of the Bitcoin blockchain is…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 16

    As we highlighted in last year’s series, Medicare paid a total of $13.5 billion for medical equipment. The billions spent on these multiple and single-use devices have proven to be a ripe target for fraud: – In 2021, St. Jude paid $27 million for allegedly selling defective heart devices. – In the same year, two…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 15

    In our September 2 post on the troubling decline in False Claims Act –recoveries in recent years, we highlighted the growing importance of declined False Claims Act cases in recovering government money lost to fraud. “Declined cases” are FCA cases brought by whistleblowers under the qui tam provision where the United States Government has “declined”…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 14

    Medicare is a bit of a unicorn in today’s politics—an overwhelmingly popular government program. But it is becoming increasingly expensive, potentially threatening its popularity and viability. In 2022, Medicare benefit payments totaled $744 billion, almost three and a half times as much as in the year 2000 when they totaled just under $200 billion. This…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 13

    The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) releases extensive datasets that are important resources for fighting fraud on the government healthcare programs—and they could be doing even more to make their data publicly available. One dataset, Physician and Other Practitioners’ Services, shows a portion of Medicare Part B (which covers outpatient care) data for…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 12

    It’s time to revisit the dismal numbers involving False Claims Act (FCA) enforcement in the defense industry. The Department of Defense (DOD) budget in fiscal year 2022 was $715 billion (with a B), up from $703.7 billion in 2021. If you take into account defense spending for agencies outside of the DOD, such as the…

  • Fraud By The Numbers 2023 – Sept. 11

    Yesterday we examined the amount of money involved in capital markets and the SEC’s resources to enforce the law. Today we want to look at an aspect of those markets that makes regulation in this area different than dealing with other types of fraud, especially in the historical context of regulating financial exchanges. In 1933,…