Fraud is hard to fight against.

Right, but the bigger point is that unintended consequences are important and can be hard to anticipate.

Your goal may be to discourage lazy freeloaders, but it will be hard to distinguish them from people who are unemployed for reasons we would not hold against them.

And even if we can clearly identify fraud, and then divert some funds we planned to give to poor households toward anti-fraud enforcement, people will have a reason to try and beat the system. When incentives change, behavior changes.

For example, say a wealthy employer now pays employees $30,000 per year. A guaranteed income program is enacted, so all the employees will now collect $12,000 per year from the program. The employer has an incentive to respond to this change, by cutting salaries to $20,000 (or quietly dismissing and re-hiring at the new rate). The employees now receive $32,000 while doing the same work, but the employer has benefitted much more. If this case is realistic, then the program could transfer wealth from less wealthy taxpayers to wealthier employers. We should be suspicious of such programs.

LET ME HOPE

Hoping is free! I hope plenty. But hoping doesn't help the poor much. We should do the work to find evidence that our actions will have the outcomes we hope for before moving forward.