Larry Hogan announced Wednesday that state officials had uncovered a massive fraudulent scheme involving 47,500 falsified unemployment insurance claims, adding up to more than $501 million. The governor said the fraud was detected when state employees with the unemployment insurance website noticed an unusual uptick in the number of out-of-state claims being submitted, prompting an investigation and eventually notifying federal authorities. Maryland Labor Department Secretary Tiffany Robinson noted that the unusual activity occurred on the fourth of July. Derek Pickle, acting special agent-in-charge of the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Labor, said the nation was seeing a significant increase in unemployment insurance fraud since Congress passed the first stimulus package. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP“To give you a sense 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 press conference.

Source: Fox News July 16, 2020 01:40 UTC