Fraud-case indicators

Identity-theft indicators show up in 1 of every 8 classified relief-fraud cases

Across 1,977 classified pandemic relief-fraud cases, 246 carry identity-theft indicators drawn from the case documents — 12.4% of these prosecuted cases, a lower bound. Narrow to the 849 cases tagged to the EIDL program and the share climbs to 16.1%. These are litigation and document indicators, not adjudicated fraud counts.

2026-09-18

Identity-theft indicators by case set: 12.4% of all classified prosecutions (a lower bound), 16.1% among EIDL-tagged

The same classification across all cases, then restricted to EIDL-tagged cases.

identity-theft indicators present

no identity-theft indicators

Each square = 1% of the selected case set; the filled squares are the share carrying identity-theft indicators, rounded to the nearest percent (12% of all classified cases, 16% of EIDL-tagged).

How firmly the cases are classified

Confidence tags on the 1,977 classifications. All but one sit at high or medium confidence.

What these indicators are. A case is flagged when its charging or court documents describe identity-theft conduct — stolen or misused personal information, synthetic identities, or unemployment-insurance identity fraud. The flags are a signal of what prosecutors alleged, not a verified rate of identity theft in the programs overall.

In the archive

Sources. Counts and rates recompute from the identity-theft classification dataset (1,977 classified cases, each drawn from a Justice Department press release): identity-theft split 246 yes / 1,731 no; EIDL-tagged subset 849 cases, 137 yes / 712 no; confidence 795 high / 1,181 medium / 1 low. Rates 246 / 1,977 = 12.4% and 137 / 849 = 16.1%, per the underlying case data.