A convicted E-Rate fraudster and a fake vendor network keep billing taxpayers millions for schools' internet.
Getting caught and getting banned are different thingsSimon Goldbrenner was still filing applications 16 days before his ban, ten years after the FBI raids, and Richard Bernstein is still not on the ban list.
Fake competition hides prices triple the market rate633 requests for bids produced one bid or none 93.7% of the time, while a public district that ran a real ad got nine bids and saw its price fall 43%.
Nobody at the table pays the bill except taxpayersFraudsters reimbursed the school's 10% share, so a $9,000-a-month bill cost the school nothing and the rest came from every American's phone bill.
Executive SummaryAI
On January 22nd, 2026, Richard Bernstein pled guilty to taking over $100,000 in kickbacks from the federal E-Rate program, which pays up to 90% of internet bills for schools with poor students, yet he received only one year of probation.
Ten weeks after the plea, consultants sharing the Bernstein name filed over 140 more applications asking the government for more than $3.3 million across 13 states, with five different Bernsteins signing and Dov Bernstein alone requesting over $2 million.
The same playbook ran in 2018 in Rockland County, where seven members of the Orthodox Jewish community were arrested over a $14 million scheme, yet the program only banned them this March, ten years after the FBI raids.
Tyler traced the ten supposedly competing vendors serving these schools and found Aaron Kraut's name on nine of them, including three companies with no boss and no employees, so the competition was never real.
Across the network, $43 million has been requested since 2017 and over $15 million collected, with $5.7 million still pending, while schools, consultants and vendors each point the finger at one another.
Key Quote
“So now you know the schools aren't really paying these bills.”