Fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding, while another $123 billion was wasted or misspent, according to an analysis conducted by the Associated Press.

Calling it the "greatest grift in U.S. history," the American news agency reported that the combined loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

Thieves in this case come from a wide variety of backgrounds, from soldiers and pastors to criminals and gang members. So far, the U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.

Investigators and outside experts blame the government's negligence while trying to disburse trillions in relief aid quickly, often with little oversight during the pandemic's early stages and too few restrictions on applicants, all of which have made the grift way too easy.

Fraudsters used the social security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks while cheats collected those benefits in multiple states, according to the agency. Meanwhile, federal loan applicants weren't cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.

"Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access," Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney's office in the Eastern District of Washington, told the Associated Press. "Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn't legal."

Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.

The programs were first launched by the Donald Trump administration, which approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion before leaving office. Joe Biden's 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee's most recent accounting.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers on both aisles are still engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who's to blame for the theft. While Republicans argue that too much money breeds fraud, waste and inflation, Democrats say they save lives, businesses and jobs. 

So far, Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional time to go after unemployment fraudsters.