Find out just how Nuke Bizzle should have done it if he decided to scam the government!
What is an EDD? First of all, what IS an EDD check? EDD stands for
Employment Development Department. An EDD check or a debit card is unemployment cash for people
who’ve lost their job. This specific EDD scam was done in California where Nuke Bizzle lived.
How easy was it for this guy to get $1.2 million dollars worth of EDD
money? What was he supposed to do if he didn’t want to get caught?!
Nuke Bizzle Who IS Nuke Bizzle anyways? His
real name is Fontrell Antonio Baines, and he’s a rapper who was originally from Memphis Tennessee.
But he’s moved to the Hollywood Hills in LA either because of his rap career, or
okay, let’s face it, it’s because he stole over a million dollars from the government!
From our digging around on the internet about Nuke Bizzle,
it just seems like he’s another rapper who hasn’t hit it big yet. He has 4 posts
on this Instagram account, and one of them is him dancing around with stacks of cash.
If you scroll through the comments, you can see that most people are on to his little
unemployment check scheme. A lot of the comments are just about the EDD money! It doesn’t seem like
he cares that many people know that he got his money through a giant scam off the government.
And if there’s ANYthing we can learn from criminals, it’s to NOT
post anything about crimes on social media, because a lot of times, they just get caught!
Nuke Bizzle Feat. Fat Wizza - EDD But you know what, this guy decided to take it
even further and made a RAP video and posted it on YouTube about his crime! In this video called EDD,
him and his boy Fat Wizza are just literally rapping about scamming the government. They rap
about getting rich off EDD checks as if nothing could go wrong for them! The most hilarious part
HAS to be the fact that he started making Free Nuke Bizzle merchandise
ever since he got arrested. He posted the link on the page ever since his
video started taking off. We definitely can’t fault that entrepreneurial spirit.
However, Nuke Bizzle isn’t the only one taking in all the free publicity.
If you check out Fat Wizza’s instagram, he’s already released a single called Free Nuke Bizzle!
Feds Watching Now, it’s true, rappers DO rap about a lot
of illegal things. However, there isn’t usually a paper trail. Obviously, they shouldn’t have made a
rap video describing how they did a federal crime! The problem for Nuke Bizzle was that someone from
the government watched his YouTube video. And the government started an investigation as well!
It also didn’t help that Nuke Bizzle that the government has been
on the lookout for fraud. Why? Because as unemployment has skyrocketed in 2020,
so have fraudulent claims for unemployment! For example, in September 2020, Arizona had flagged
roughly 1 million out of 2.4 million unemployment claims as fraud. That’s more than 40%!
The Nuke Bizzle Playbook To run an EDD scam more than once, a
lot of different identities are needed. And there also need to be places to mail the checks or the
debit cards. And getting hands on the cash means creating fake identities with fake bank accounts.
And that’s exactly what Nuke Bizzle did. According to the Feds,
he created multiple fake identities to do his scam to get unemployment
cash that was intended for people laid off because of the pandemic.
Somehow, he was able to get debit cards issued in the names of other people. A lot of the identities
were just stolen identities from the internet. He then had the debit cards mailed to places
where Nuke Bizzle and his team of scammers had access to in different places in Los Angeles.
The Feds found that at least 92 debit cards that had been pre-loaded with more than $1.2
million dollars were mailed to these addresses.
Nuke Bizzle and his scammers allegedly withdrew more than seven hundred grand cash from the cards!
Las Vegas detectives actually found a live stream video on Nuke Bizzle’s Instagram account that
showed people withdrawing cash from several ATMs with the “EDD” song playing in the background.
The Real Mistake But where exactly did Nuke Bizzle and
his team mess up? Was it the rap video? Or was it having someone’s actual name used on an address?
How exactly did they get all the stolen identities? The way we see it,
if they decided to do a crime, they should have just done the crime all the way.
It wasn’t making the rap video that was the REALLY dumb part. That was only
pretty dumb. The really dumb part is using his real name for any part of the crime.
They shouldn’t have used ANY thing with their legal names on it. That way the police can’t trace
any part of the scam to them. And especially don’t carry around any of the debit cards
with the stolen identities printed on them! But of course, if this guy was dumb enough
to make a rap video about his crimes, he wasn’t smart enough to NOT use his real
name somewhere. 74 of the EDD claims were mailed to just one single specific address.
The property at that address was a rental property that offered short term leases. Nuke Bizzle rented
that property IN HIS LEGAL NAME! He was staying there between June and August 2020. He even
returned to the property after he moved out just to collect the checks! The fact that he used his
legal name made it really easy for investigators to figure out who was behind the scam.
The Smart Play What was the smart
play for Nuke Bizzle? If he had actually used a fake ID to stay at the place,
the police would have had a much harder time catching him. Because even if Las Vegas police
recognized Baines as Nuke Bizzle on the street, they can’t just search him for EDD debit cards
just because of a rap video! The rap video didn’t help because it’s what alerted the Feds.
They might have not gotten caught if they didn’t make a video about it on YouTube.
And the police definitely would have had a tougher
time catching them if he had used fake identities for everything.
Picture this scenario. Let’s say he had used a fake ID to rent that one property where he
sent the EDD checks to. Investigators would be looking for the person whose identity was stolen.
All Baines had to do was just not carry any of the fake IDs and walk around with his
real IDs. The police wouldn’t have been able to connect him to the scams
if they stopped him for whatever reason. That would have been the smart play.
Actually, the smartest play is to NOT do any crime at all.
The smarter play would have been to do what these smart rappers did. Find out more here!
In order to arrest Nuke Bizzle, all the police had to do was figure out his real name, which
they did, and then match him up with his real ID in real life when they found him, which they did!
The Aftermath The rap video was what put Nuke Bizzle on the
radar with the Feds. He was arrested just 12 short days after the video was released on YouTube! On
September 23rd 2020, Las Vegas police arrested Fontrelle Antonio Baines, aka Nuke Bizzle.
When he was arrested, police found EIGHT EDD debit cards, seven of which were in the names
of other people. If he’s found guilty of all his charges, he’s looking at 22 years in prison.
Here’s what’s next!