Corona Daily 016: A Violinist and a Nigerian

Violinist Philip Payton, like most musicians who play in an orchestra, was neither rich nor poor. Playing regularly in Disney’s musical “Frozen” allowed him to pay his bills, and have a summer vacation. March 2020 shut down the orchestra. Philip applied for unemployment insurance. From April, he started receiving $504 a week, and an extra $600 authorized by the Congress. That is the good thing about America. It takes care of every citizen in crisis times. Philip could live normally. Locked up in the house, his expenses had come down anyway.

In the middle of September, the weekly payments suddenly stopped. The pandemic was on, the orchestra was shut, no reason why payments should have stopped. Philip contacted New York’s Department of Labor. He was told the payments had stopped because he was claiming the allowance in another state. For two months, nobody told him what the whole thing was about. He stopped receiving any money.  

By January 2021, his only success was to learn the name of the state where he was reportedly claiming the unemployment allowance –Texas. It took him another couple of months to reach the Texas commission. The commission told Philip he was on the black list of people who had tried to claim the benefit in several states.

In all, Philip Payton didn’t get his unemployment allowance for eight months, though he was out of job for the entire period. His name had a “fraud block” placed on it.

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Abidemi Rufai works as a senior special assistant to the governor of a Nigerian state. On 14 May 2021, with a first-class cabin boarding pass in hand, he was ready to board the flight at John.F. Kennedy international airport. Rufai’s brother lives in New York. Before he could board, FBI agents arrested him, and charged him with stealing more than $350,000 in unemployment benefits from Washington State alone.

Rufai used stolen identities to claim unemployment benefits in 11 states, including more than 100 applications in Washington. State auditors found 250,000 potentially bogus claims totaling $1.1 billion.

Rufai used variations of his email sandytangy58@gmail.com. Gmail allows its user to place, move or delete the dots in any place. The Gmail owner still receives emails irrespective of the dot placement. Rufai modified the mail address into variations like san.dyta.ngy58@gmail.com or sa.nd.ytang.y58@gmail.com .The state servers treated each as a separate person, allowing such addresses to be filed in several states. Rufai could still carry out the correspondence from a single email thanks to the Gmail feature.

Rufai and his allies asked the states to pay benefits into “Green Dot” online banking accounts, a popular fintech platform reportedly loved by criminals. Alternatively, they used “money mules” ( Last September, I wrote about this mechanism).

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FBI found in Rufai’s email account a mind-boggling amount of stolen information, including passwords to people’s email accounts, security questions and answers, driver’s licence numbers, bank accounts and routing numbers, and more than 1000 stolen tax returns.

Rufai has pleaded not guilty. In the bail application filed in June, his lawyer said Rufai has no criminal record. The prosecutors are deliberately offering false information and exaggerating the alleged crimes. They are trying to malign the reputation of a well-respected Nigerian government official.

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ProPublica is a New York based organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. It has won five Pulitzer prizes for its stories.

This week, ProPublica has published a detailed report on how unemployment insurance fraud exploded during the pandemic. They feel this is perhaps the largest fraud wave in history. For those interested or curious, I recommend reading the article by Cezary Podkul in ProPublica.

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Ravi