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Fighting False Unemployment Claims

December 22nd, 2015 by Mike Vasilinda

The State office that processes unemployment claims raised eyebrows when it said it wants three point five million to investigate false claims, but as Mike Vasilinda tells us, the point isn’t who should be investigating, but that someone should.

In the last year, as many as one in 8 unemployment claims…have been fraudulent says  Jesse Panuccio, Dept. Economic Opportunity Exec. Dir.

“It’s this identity theft based fraud, and we’re talking about billions of records being stolen every year” says Panuccio.

A tour of the dark web shows just how easy it is to buy someone’s identity.

Q:“So that could be me there for forty-five cents?”

“That’s right”

For a buck and a half a piece, we found sites offering some’s complete credit history, bank balances, and everything else in a mortgage application. Another site apparently hacked a bank, and for twelve and a half dollars apiece, you can even get bank login information.” John Sacco works to prevent fraud at DEO.

“The marginal cost of filing a fraudulent unemployment claim is very small for them, so, if they file 100 claims and one of those pays out, even if its just for a few weeks, it’s potentially worthwhile for them to continue that activity” says Sacco.

DEO sent a ripple through he legislature when it asked for three and a half million dollars to set up a unit with police powers, but Panuccio says if not them, who?”

“When you put unemployment fraud up against other crimes; murders, assaults, and things like that, you know, monetary crimes sometimes take a back seat.

Ironically, one of the ways to fight this high tech crime is old technology. DEO is simply picking up the phone and asking employers if that person ever worked there.

DEO declined to discuss other fraud prevention measures. In the last year, it has detected 135 thousand fraudulent filings worth almost half a billion dollars.

With every scheme that’s broken, a new one pops up, which is why DEO also is asking to have a unit to do nothing but hack their system looking for ways to cheat.

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