The scheme involved fraud from previous security breaches and did suggest that any of the private information submitted within the legitimate claims had been compromised in any way.
“This criminal enterprise seeking to require advantage of a worldwide pandemic to steal many millions, perhaps billions, of dollars from taxpayers governor said the fraud was detected when state employees with the unemployment insurance website noticed an unusual uptick within the number of out-of-state claims being submitted, prompting an investigation, and eventually notifying federal authorities.
Maryland Department of Labor Secretary Tiffany Robinson noted that the weird activity occurred on the fourth of July.
“It is clearly a coordinated criminal enterprise because this is often not just random people in their basement that stole somebody’s identity," Hogan told reporters.
Robinson said that they were ready to save taxpayers "hundreds of many dollars” by catching the scheme quickly thanks to the heightened security measures in situ .s is despicable,” said Hogan speaking from a news conference Wednesday.
"We will still work with our state and federal partners to stop fraudsters from capitalizing upon the hardships caused by the coronavirus during these already difficult and unsure times,” she added.
Hogan did note that a couple of “real” people did get their accounts frozen which the Department of Labor would work quickly to urge them their payments.
Derek Pickle, acting special agent-in-charge of the Office of the military officer at the U.S. Department of Labor, said the state was seeing a big increase in unemployment insurance fraud since Congress passed the primary stimulus package. An estimated 12 states have seen similar fraud schemes.
“To offer you a way of how that spike corresponds to our work, unemployment insurance fraud investigations have historically made up approximately 10 percent of our agency’s investigative workload," Pickle said at Wednesday’s news conference .
"Today quite 50 percent of our investigative matters pertain to unemployment insurance which number continues to grow by the day which includes investigative matters altogether 50 states.”
State and federal offices are coordinating together to locate and stop fraudulent claims, though Hogan said they didn't yet know whether the offenders were based within the U.S. or overseas.
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