Hacker News Reader

There was also a ton of fraud (some estimates were 1/3 of the money went to scammers and foreign people). They didn't have a good way to check if a business was an actual business or not. This resulted in entire neighborhoods of people getting 10K each by sharing the scam [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-24/small-bus...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-bus...

View on HN

What's the demographic of the scammers? Are they immoral rich people who don't need the money and just love the idea of scamming the government? Are they poor people desperate enough to steal from the government? If the latter then the stimulus was actually quite well spent.

A lot of the money went to gangs in foreign countries. There were some stories of immoral rich people like the rapper who got over a million dollars and boasted about it, but I imagine most were dishonest poor people. The problem is this rewards a small pool of scammers, and the honest poor are left even further behind.

But it sounds like you want to believe it was money well spent, so I don't imagine this would convince you otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com