Unemployment fraud

There are a very large number of people being affected by unemployment fraud. My company HR department is almost overwhelmed. Usually they get about two or three a month. There have been something like 500 so far this month. I know three people affected by this.

You can save yourself some hassle if you create an account with a secure password on the Washington State Employment Security Department website.

https://www.esd.wa.gov/

You will need your SSN, mailing address, date of birth and an email address.

What’s happening is that people get this information from public (or illegal) sources and create an account in your name then have the unemployment checks sent to them. It takes a cycle or two before your employer and Washington State get it figured out and you might get hassled in the process. Prevent this by creating your account and just “Look up your past wages” rather than apply for unemployment. It’s just the creation of the account that is the important part.

I suspect this is not restricted to Washington state.

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One thought on “Unemployment fraud

  1. Spokane dude here, working in the mail room an a letter from ESD came in today – the usual list of unemployment claims.

    But wait! one of our C-levels was on it? I just saw him a couple days ago… bunch of other staff that I know damn well were not furloughed or anything.

    Including me. Date claimed was when I was in the middle of an FMLA period, for surgery in February and (slow) recovery from same.

    HR informed (I had previously quoted your post in reply to an email regarding unemployment fraud earlier this week), ESD informed (and creating an ESD account showed that my SSN was associated with an AOL account, and I never had one of those, so a second ESD fraud notification was done) and SSA as well.

    WA residents/workers, y’all log in and see if your identity has been ganked!

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