Crooks comb data breaches for names

Criminals said to be targeting unemployment programs

Criminals have combed through names in nationwide and worldwide data breaches as part of their efforts to fraudulently collect California unemployment benefits using stolen identities, the state’s Employment Development Department reported Thursday.

“The EDD is aggressively fighting fraud in the wake of unscrupulous attacks on the unemployment program here in California and across the county,” the state labor agency said Thursday.

In addition, crooks appear to have exploited California’s efforts to expedite payments to workers who had filed for benefits under a special coronavirus-linked progam called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, also known as PUA.

The assistance effort was set up under a federal program to deploy jobless benefits to gig workers, self-employed individuals, or small business owners who typically wouldn’t qualify for regular unemployment benefits and who had lost work or closed their businesses due to coronavirus-linked shutdowns.

Some residents of California, including a Hayward woman who contacted this news organization, said they have received multiple documents from the EDD bearing the names of other people. In some instances, the mail contained the debit cards that are the electronic gateways to deploy payments to unemployed workers.

“These perpetrators are often using stolen identity information from national and global data breaches, as well as exploiting expedited payment efforts in the federal PUA program,” the EDD said.

The EDD had been backdating the payments for the pandemic unemployment assistance program as a way to speed disbursement to jobless workers. But that approach will halt — which may slow future payments.

The state labor agency also is taking steps to combat fraud arising from names that had been filched from the database breaches.

“Claims identified as suspected fraud have been suspended or closed while EDD investigators partner with local, state, and federal law enforcement to expose and prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law,” the EDD said.