833-847-3280
Schedule a Call

Unemployment Fraud

Unemployment fraud

Last year is the year that keeps on giving, at least for the people stealing identities and filing for unemployment.

It’s an understatement to say COVID-19 drastically affected employees around the country.  Many employees ended up laid off, or entrepreneurs lost their businesses due to budget constraints.  That meant more people than ever were filing for unemployment.  Additionally, the federal government implemented an increase in the payments provided to many unemployed claimants.

This resulted in the perfect storm for criminals to defraud the state governments by filing fraudulent unemployment claims.

A MainNerve Partner called to inquire about a concern that a former employee may have gained access to their Human Resources data and was using it criminally.  In reality, it was cybercriminals looking for a quick buck.

How does unemployment fraud work?

With large-scale data breaches, such as the one at Experian, most people’s information is available on the dark web.  It’s easy for a criminal to take information from a previous data breach and do a quick web search to see where each person is employed. The attackers will then file an unemployment claim. After that, they start on another person’s identity and wait for the money to come through.  It’s a repeatable process in a numbers game that is helping hackers gain easy money.

And if the criminals don’t do the additional research, they will fill in random company names.  These companies then receive documents about unemployment for people they don’t know.  Dealing with this issue takes time away from what the companies should be doing, their jobs.

However, some criminals don’t realize that the money is often sent to the person’s address whose identity was stolen or someone else’s completely.  Many people report receiving multiple unemployment checks, with different names listed above their addresses.

So far, the current estimate of $200 billion has been lost to this fraudulent scheme. It affects taxpayers, businesses, and employees who might not be able to receive unemployment benefits due to criminals already filing for them.

The best we can do is report the fraudulent activity when we see it and hope that the states’ departments of labor can implement better verification methods to reduce false claims.

Latest Posts

A transparent image used for creating empty spaces in columns
In today’s digital landscape, cyberattacks are relentless, sophisticated, and increasingly costly. Yet, many government regulations designed to protect sensitive data and critical infrastructure fall short, not because they lack good intentions, but because they fail to explicitly require penetration testing as a standard practice. This regulatory ambiguity…
A transparent image used for creating empty spaces in columns
 Every IT manager knows the drill. You schedule your annual penetration test, the security team arrives, runs their tools, and delivers a comprehensive report detailing vulnerabilities and recommendations. You check the compliance box, file the report, and get back to your daily grind. Fast…
A transparent image used for creating empty spaces in columns
When a major brand like Victoria’s Secret, MGM, or T-Mobile gets hacked, it’s all over the news. These companies are household names, and a breach affecting them often exposes millions of customer records, making it a national, or even global, story. But what about small…
A transparent image used for creating empty spaces in columns
 Choosing a penetration tester isn’t just about credentials or price; it’s about trust, depth, and the results they deliver. In today’s rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, selecting the right penetration testing partner is more critical than ever. At MainNerve, we’ve witnessed significant shifts in the…
A transparent image used for creating empty spaces in columns
Cybersecurity threats in 2025 are evolving faster than most organizations can keep pace with. In early 2025, a global financial institution paid out a staggering $75 million following a ransomware attack. The cause? A single, compromised endpoint tied to a legacy application that had gone…
A transparent image used for creating empty spaces in columns
   Targeted retesting focuses only on the vulnerabilities you’ve already remediated. It’s scoped tightly around the affected systems, configurations, or application components that were updated, patched, or re-engineered in response to findings from the original penetration test. This approach offers several key benefits: 1.…
contact

Our Team

Name(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
On Load
Where? .serviceMM
What? Mega Menu: Services