FCC Kept ObamaPhone Fraud A Secret So They Could Expand Program
http://blurbrain.com/fcc-kept-obamaphone-fraud-secret-expand-program/via Whoopie on April 14th, 2016 in Crime, Economy, Politics, socialism
Federal regulators were instructed to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a controversial vote to expand a program that was allegedly used to bilk taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars, one those regulators claims.
Commissioners were told that the Notice of Apparent Liability could not be released or publicly discussed until April 1, 2016, conveniently one day after the Commission was scheduled to expand the Lifeline program to broadband.
FCC spokesman Will Wiquist insisted that the timing was completely coincidental. “The timing of the enforcement action was in no way related to the timing of the vote on the program modernization,” he said in an email.
Critics of the Lifeline program began calling its subsidized cell phones “Obamaphones” early in the Obama administration in response to viral YouTube videos of beneficiaries thanking the president for their free phones.
The FCC’s NAL last week accused cell phone provider Total Call Mobile, which provides Lifeline services in 19 states, of “systematic and egregious misconduct” and “widespread enrollment fraud.”
According to the commission, Total Call employees enrolled tens of thousands of duplicate Lifeline beneficiaries and pocketed the extra subsidies. The FCC caught onto the scheme when the company enrolled an undercover FCC investigator in the program without asking for any eligibility documentation.
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While the article notes that the program was started by Reagan, it was Obama who expanded the program from landline subsidies to a free cell phone with free service.
A person only had to show that they were already receiving some form of financial aid (Welfare, Foodstamps, Medicaid, Sec. 8) to get their free phone with a subsidized calling plan.
The irony is that many “poor folks” who took advantage of the offer already had a $400 iPhone or $200 Android handset in their pocket. Furthermore, companies like Total Call Mobile made no effort to ensure that recipients weren’t fraudulently obtaining multiple phones.
In fact, according to the FCC, Total Call Mobile knowingly encouraged such fraud so they could double bill the government.
Now we discover that the government, knowing of this fraud kept it a secret so the news wouldn’t impact plans to expand the program further.
The original plan offered a relatively inexpensive “dumb” handset that allowed users to send and receive voice and text messages. Now they want to expand the service to a smart phone with 3G wireless broadband, so users can ‘surf the web’ at taxpayer expense.
As anyone with a smart phone knows, providers offer free unlimited voice and text because they make their money on the ‘data plan’ side of the subscription. Typically someone might spend a minute or two making a phone call, but hours visiting websites, streaming video and checking emails.
All this from a program that was originally intended to give low-income folks free phone service in case they had an emergency.
