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Army Fraud Crackdown Uses Broad Net to Catch Small Fish, Some Unfairly - The New York Times

posted onMay 29, 2017
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Article snippet: AGUAS BUENAS, Puerto Rico — Federal agents with body armor and assault rifles stormed a small house in this hillside town on a dark October night two years ago, intent on arresting a retired National Guard captain suspected of an elaborate scheme to defraud the military. But in a sign of larger problems to come in the investigation, they raided the wrong house. Twice. That night, scores of agents from the mainland stormed houses all over the island, arresting at gunpoint 25 current and former National Guard soldiers whom authorities accused of claiming hundreds of referral bonuses for recruits they had never met. They included Ángel Perales Muñoz, the captain whose address they could not find. He eventually learned about the raids and turned himself in a few hours later. “That they couldn’t bother to correctly figure out where I live shows everything about this investigation,” Mr. Perales said in an interview this winter, weeks before a federal trial in which he faced up to 20 years in prison. “They never wanted to understand what was going on; they just wanted to show they were making arrests.” The raids in Puerto Rico were part of Task Force Raptor, a nationwide antifraud operation run by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command that has grown into one of the largest criminal investigations ever conducted in the military. The task force has looked into tens of thousands of current and former soldiers from Maine to Guam. More than 150 have been charged, while 5... Link to the full article to read more

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