A Channel 2 investigation has found Georgians have been logging onto their unemployment accounts only to find someone has changed their contact information and re-routed their money.
The latest problem is a part of ongoing fraud investigations with the state Department of Labor and federal law enforcement. Authorities believe it’s tied to identity theft.
Starting last month, Channel 2 investigative reporter Nicole Carr began getting messages about these unauthorized changes happening to our viewers through virtual state portals that should only be accessible to unemployment benefit claimant.
Deborah Crowder came to us in July after months of trying to get in contact with the Georgia Department of Labor.
Her two sons lost their jobs in May, their employer approved their unemployment, and the benefits are being processed.
According to Georgia’s online portal, the money is being loaded onto each of their state-issued unemployment insurance debit cards, and it’s also being spent. But Crowder’s sons never received the cards.
“To be exact, almost close to $3,000 has been taken from each account, from each one of their accounts,” Crowder said about the spending. “We just want answers. I mean, this is ridiculous.”
Crowder and her sons recently accessed the online portal to find the names and payment information are correct, but the phone numbers and email addresses in the portal no longer belong to them. In one case, neither does the address. The benefits and communication aren’t being sent to Carrollton. Instead they’d been re-routed to a southwest Atlanta address.
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Carr visited the address this week, where she found the homeowner, Ray Price. Price said he wasn’t receiving Crowders’ sons unemployment money or communication, but he was facing a similar problem. Personal information had been changed in his online portal , as well.
“I’m glad you knocked on my door, I appreciate this. This is fraudulent. That’s my address. This is the house you at right? So it’s got my unemployment messed up,” Price said.
Seeing Carr was a reporter, he asked for her name – and then for help.
“Can you give me a card and help me straighten out mine, please?” Price said.
Crowder, who lost his job in the hospitality industry, said his benefits were processing smoothly until early July. The payments stopped , and he could no longer access his online portal. This week, a representative with the DOL told him his personal information did not match what they had in the system, and it could not be unlocked for him.
“She asked me for my mother’s maiden name; none of that match what they had, what they had on their file,” Price said about when he called the Department of Labor.
“So yesterday my wife tried to update it,” Price said Tuesday. “And now they saying when she tried to update it and put in my Social and the PIN that I had established, the PIN I’ve been using all along, it don’t go together. I just tried to file unemployment today. I need my bread, I need money like yesterday.”
A similar incident happened to Darius Moore. He told Carr that he stopped receiving direct deposits, so he logged onto the portal. That’s when he saw his bank account information was changed.
“I’m lost for words honestly. I’m lost,” Moore said.
He was able to talk to someone at the labor department.
“She mentioned to me that my account was changed to a Chime account. And I’m like, ‘Chime? That’s not my account. I bank with Delta credit union,’” Moore said.
Carr took each claimants’ case to the Georgia Department of Labor, where suspected identity theft fraud investigations are now underway.
Georgia Department of Labor commissioner Mark Butler said the state is working with federal officials and the state attorney general to form an unemployment insurance task force, add investigators and better secure the state’s system technology, as they’ve moved to processing unemployment claims 100% online for the first time.
“The sheer volume of attempted fraud is spectacular right now,” Butler said. “There’s a lot of stuff being currently added internally to help stop a lot of this.”
Carr learned much of it involves identity theft from scammers who have been compiling information for years.
“If they’re (bad actors) picking off one (claimant) at a time here and there, it makes it very difficult to catch up with them,” Butler said, encouraging people to secure their online identities. “They’re making good use of the chaos right now.”
Butler said in any given year, about 40% of claims are deemed valid. The department figures at least that much is true with the three million claims being processed during the pandemic.
“Everything that we’re seeing right now is times one thousand,” Butler said, noting claims are being processed more slowly to combat fraud.
“We warned about this three, four months ago. When we’re getting a lot of complaints, you guys got to go fast, you got to go faster, you got to approve them faster, approve them faster. I said, ‘Well, here in about two, three months, you guys are going to be back here. And you’re going to be saying, ‘Well, hey, what are you doing about this fraud that is happening?’” Butler said.
Georgia noted a sharp, unusual increase in claims that surfaced around the July 4 weekend - the same time federal officials notified a handful of states that their unemployment systems had been compromised by scammers who had been a part of database breaches that had nothing to do with the state’s unemployment systems.
It led to states like Maryland to put a stop payment on unemployment insurance benefits, and re-issue them once they’d verified the right people were on the receiving end of the claim. Georgia hasn’t pinpointed any specific source of attempted fraud, like a database breach.
The state is also looking into Georgians filing for out-of-state UI benefits. Last month, Carr reported on how a Clayton County woman found herself on the receiving end of California beneficiaries’ UI cards and communication. She was not the filer, but she was mailed strangers’ unemployment information.
Each of our viewers’ claims from this story are now a part of an ongoing probe with DOL investigators working alongside federal authorities.
“We do plan on fully investigating all these and they will be prosecuted. So, I mean, this is not going to be something that we’re going to take lightly. We’re going to take it very seriously,” Butler said.
Butler said the department will get everyone’s money and information straightened out.
Carr checked back Thursday with each person in this story and they all said they have received contact from the labor department.
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