“One guy on a telephone call bragged he just bought a $400 watch for his mother thanks to the state.”

A scheme supposedly gave Scott Peterson and other California inmates COVID-19 unemployment benefits.

Attorneys described it as “the most significant fraud on taxpayer funds in California history.”

State and federal prosecutors investigated “fraud in the pandemic relief system administered by the state Employment Development Department [EDD].” For some reason, California does not have “a system that ‘cross matches’ prison and jail data with unemployment claims.”

From The Los Angeles Times:

The potential fraud came to light after district attorneys in Los Angeles, Lassen and San Mateo counties uncovered questionable claims coming from local jails and prisons, in part from monitoring recorded phone conversations of inmates while investigating unrelated crimes, said multiple sources familiar with the investigations. Investigators also noticed large money orders being sent to inmates.

Riverside Dist. Atty. Mike Hestrin said the scheme works typically by someone on the outside doing the paperwork. The payments usually go to an address outside of prison. Once the cash card is obtained, the person on the outside puts some of the funds into the inmate’s prison account, where it can be used to buy services and goods such as food and stamps.

This article was sourced from LegalInsurrection