In 2021, near the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, investigators tailed a Jeep Cherokee stolen from an airport Avis to a New York City apartment they called a “fraud factory” – no furniture, just an air mattress, a computer, stacks of loan and tax forms, and a shredder.
Two men who had first met in prison – Adedayo Ilori, 43, and Chris Recamier, 59 – were using stolen identities and fake paperwork to falsely claim they employed 200 people, bilking the federal government’s pandemic-relief programs of more than $1 million, according to federal prosecutors. They used the stolen money to splurge on big-ticket purchases, such as cryptocurrency, leasing luxury apartments and a Mercedes, the evidence showed.
Recamier got nine years in prison. In October 2023, after a judge sentenced Ilori to 25 years – at the time, the harshest punishment for a pandemic fraud case – U.S. Attorney Damian Williams thanked the usual partners in law enforcement, including the FBI and the NYPD.
But Williams also expressed gratitude to an agency, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which is so little-known that the press release announcing Ilori’s conviction used a footnote to explain what it was: a small office in the Justice Department established by Congress in 2020 to track fraud related to the $5 trillion the government lent or spent to help Americans survive COVID-19. Mostly under the radar, the Accountability Committee built data-analysis capabilities that, as of January 2023, had identified an estimated $5.4 billion in pandemic fraud, according to congressional testimony last month by DOJ’s Inspector General and committee head, Michael E. Horowitz.
