LOS ANGELES, California — The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has received 270,000 applications from purported homeowners in the recent L.A. fires — though only about 13,000 homes were destroyed.
A FEMA official gave the staggering figure — more than twenty times the number of affected homes — as concerns about fraudulent applications continue to plague the agency, more than two months after the fire.
(UPDATE: FEMA clarified to Breitbart News that the 270,000 number refers to individuals and households, not just homeowners.)
As Breitbart News has reported, many displaced residents had tried applying for FEMA relief, only to find that someone else had already applied in their name and with their address, locking them out of the system.
FEMA attempts to make relief funds easy to apply for, but the downside is that fraudsters can more easily take advantage of the system. A FEMA official said that problem was a major reason for closing applications at the end of the month, instead of extending them for a full year, as Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) requested.
Identity theft in natural disasters may seem shocking, but it is not uncommon — especially when maps of affected areas and addresses are easily available online. Several individuals have already been arrested for fraud in connection with FEMA grants in the L.A. fires — one of whom is suspected of having collected on similar fraudulent applications for two decades, going back to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
Newly-installed Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman had warned in January that fraudsters would descend on L.A. Victims have been asked to contact the FBI, at 1-800-CALL-FBI/.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Photo: file
This article has been updated with more precise information from FEMA.
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