Tennessee rapper who boasted about Covid fraud gets 6-year prison sentence

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Tennessee rapper who boasted about Covid fraud gets 6-year prison sentence

A Tennessee rapper who boasted about committing Covid 19 relief fraud in a music video was sentenced Wednesday to over six years in prison, prosecutors said.

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said the 77 month sentence also included guilty pleas in separate cases of gun and drug counts.

Fontrell Antonio Baines, of Memphis, who goes by Nuke Bizzle, stolen more than $700,000 in Covid 19 unemployment benefits in a scheme in which other people's names or stolen identities were used, prosecutors said.

According to court documents, Baines, 33, bragged about the fraud in videos on YouTube and Instagram. The fraud went from July to September 2020.

A song posted online in September 2020 was called EDD, which is the name of California's Employment Development Department in charge of unemployment payments.

The video, cited by prosecutors in court documents, shows handfuls of $100 bills and people checking the mail and typing on laptops. At one point another performer raps, You gotta sell cocaine, I can file a claim. In addition to the Covid fraud case, the U.S. attorney's office for Central California said that Baines pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon and possession of oxycodone with intent to distribute.

In a letter to the judge, Baines said he had remorse. Every day that I think about what I did, I regret my actions and the impact my crime had on others, he wrote.

In addition to the prison sentence, Baines was ordered to pay $704,760 in restitution.

Congress approved massive financial resources to help people affected by the Covid-19 epidemic, which shut down large parts of the economy.

The U.S. Labor Department's inspector general s office has estimated that $872.5 billion in pandemic unemployment insurance funding and at least $163 billion in pandemic unemployment insurance benefits could have been improperly paid, some of it through fraud.