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with ties to the drill rap scene turned the COVID-19 unemployment program into a “bottomless ATM” machine, using stolen identities to score more than $4 million, police and the feds said.
Cops caught wind of the fraud when members of the NYPD’s intelligence bureau noticed that members of the Canarsie-based Woo gang were making trips to California, renting houses, buying expensive cars and posing on social media with stacks of cash at the beginning of the pandemic.
Christopher Jean Pierre and Keith James. (Court Evidence)
That led to a federal probe with the Department of Labor Inspector General’s office – and on Thursday, the arrest of 11 suspects in a scheme to steal nearly $20 million in unemployment funds.
They got away with more than $4.3 million before authorities cut off the money flow and arrested them, police allege.
They even bragged about the scheme in a YouTube rap video, Trappin’, with the lyrics, “Unemployment got us workin’ a lot.”
In New York State, applicants for COVID-related unemployment were given ATM cards issued by KeyBank, or got the money through direct deposits into existing bank accounts or old-fashioned paper checks.
“The result of this was like gang criminal magic. It was a never ending spigot of money, because when you tapped out the funds from one identity, you simply moved on to another, and to another, and to another,” said NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information John Miller. “Imagine a bottomless ATM that was free, and just spit out cash.”
Early in the pandemic, the state had such a high demand for unemployment claims that its web site crashed,
leading Google to help fix and re-design the site.
The system helped people in need apply quickly, but it also offered an opportunity for the gang members to get rich quickly, at least early on, Miller said.
One of the suspects, Romean Brown, 23, was pulled over for blowing a stop sign in Brooklyn in January 2021, and had three KeyBank debit cards on him, according to a federal complaint.
Jahriah Olivierre and Romean Brown (Court Evidence)
He posted a message months earlier on Facebook, asking if he should open a new chat on Telegram so he could get even more IDs to use. “S--- is too easy,” he said, according to the compliant.
“Individual gang members were purchasing hundreds of names from the dark web, the deep web and criminal sources that included social security numbers,” Miller said.
They’d also get driver’s licenses, often for $150 a piece, according to federal court documents.