Employment Security Department Commissioner Suzi LeVine today reported that the state unemployment insurance system has suffered a rash of fraudulent claims”

Since the start of May – and particularly in the past week – the Employment Security Department has seen a significant rise in reports of impostor fraud. This is where bad actors have stolen Washingtonians’ personal information from sources outside of the agency and are using it to apply for unemployment benefits. …

Our agency has many controls and gates in place to prevent, identify and block fraud …

Some additional steps we’re taking as we see this increase in impostor fraud include:

Dramatically increasing the number of agents on the fraud hotline; 100 more of whom just started yesterday.

Hiring more fraud investigators.

Cross matching data with other state agencies and across the country to detect fraud activity.

Working with the U.S. Department of Labor to detect and prevent fraud.

Out of an abundance of caution, we are also holding payments for an additional 1-2 days this week so we can validate claims as authentic. We apologize for the hardship this may cause for valid claimants. …

Finally, here are the three most important things for people to know about unemployment impostor fraud:

1. If someone is a victim of fraud, they will not have to repay the money.

2. If someone is a victim of fraud and then needs to apply for benefits, they will still be able to do so.

3. We will only be reaching out to people from the esd.wa.gov domain and only asking people to provide information on our website: esd.wa.gov. We have seen other fraudsters offering to help individuals and businesses by sending them to phony web pages asking for their employees’ information. …

The complete text of Commissioner LeVine’s statement is here.