By the first COVID summer, no one knew who was who. In Nigeria, an oil company IT engineer was allegedly filing for unemployment in California and 16 other states with a slew of fake Gmail accounts. At a desert state prison in Imperial County, an inmate used personal data bought on the dark web to funnel unemployment money to his wife for a $71,000 Audi and a down payment on a house. Along the Pacific coast in Carlsbad, Danny Ramos was one of millions of real California workers realizing that something was going very wrong, as weeks or months went by without the unemployment benefits they badly needed.
“It felt,” Ramos said, “like this was just a big old scam.”
As California unemployment claims spiked 2,300% in the early months of 2020, the state’s top labor officials ricocheted from crisis to crisis, internal communications obtained by CalMatters show. Emails and emergency meeting notes detail how the long-troubled California Employment Development Department became the focal point — and then the punching bag — for state efforts to stave off economic collapse while contending with a historic wave of fraud.
“This is bigger than anything we have ever experienced,” then-EDD Director Sharon Hilliard wrote in an email the day before California shut down in mid-March 2020. “Everybody is moving at the speed of light.”
But soon, Bank of America, the EDD’s unemployment debit card contractor, warned that it might not have enough plastic to print the millions of cards that the agency needed. An assistant in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office emailed the state’s then-Labor Secretary Julie Su asking what to do about someone fraudulently using his Social Security Number to file for unemployment. A staffer for San Francisco Assemblymember Phil Ting pleaded for help for a constituent so distraught about “the runaround” from EDD that she was suicidal.
All across the country, states were dealing with their own versions…
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