Washington’s unemployment system sees spike in impostors during virus pandemic

OLYMPIA — Because of an increase in attempted “impostor fraud” applications for weekly unemployment benefits during the ongoing coranavirus pandemic, officials in Washington said Thursday they will be holding all payments for as much as two days this week while they take additional steps to verify claims.

Employment Security Department Commissioner Suzi LeVine said that there have been no data breaches at the agency, but she said that the recent fraud attempts are cases where someone’s personal information has been previously stolen from other sources — like during the 2017 Equifax breach — and is now being used to filed for benefits.

She said that Washington’s high weekly maximum benefit of as much as $790 per week, in addition to the extra weekly $600 from the federal economic package, are among the reasons the system is “an attractive target for fraudsters.”

“Impostor fraud is not new and it is not unique,” she said. “What’s new is the scale, and that is profound.”

LeVine said she couldn’t give specific numbers right now, but said that once the department spots an irregularity in an application, it is flagged and the account is put on hold until it can be investigated. She said they then cross-match claims data in a new national fraud detection system. She said that in the past week, they’ve learned of many of the cases after hearing from employers or employees who received notifications about claims that they did not file.

She said that the department has increased staffing on its fraud line, and that the decision to hold payments for a few days this week “will give us the opportunity, out of an abundance of caution, so that that we can validate claims as authentic.”

Claims continue to stack up in Washington, Idaho

Unemployed workers in Washington and Idaho continued to file for benefits during the week of May 2-9, with Washington taking 109,425 more initial claims and Idaho receiving 5,795 filings.

Since the start of the coronavirus shutdowns in mid-March, there have been 1,775,629 initial claims in Washington and 131,101 in Idaho.

In Washington, the state has paid out nearly $2.9 billion in benefits. LeVine said that more than 751,000 people who have filed an initial claim have been paid, and that the agency is working to expedite payments for those still waiting, while protecting the system from those seeking to fraudulently gain access to payments. About 50,000 claims are currently in adjudication.

The Idaho Department of Labor reported that $70 million in regular benefits have been paid out, along with $504,000 in Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation payments and $123.9 million in Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation payments. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance payment information will be available next week.