State business owners battle fraudulent unemployment claims

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WTVQ) – Governor Beshear says unemployment fraud related to the pandemic is surging.

David Neville owns Capstone Auction Services, an agriculture business, and says his first reaction was confusion.

“I got the claim I thought well that’s really odd. And like most people, I think I thought well this doesn’t pertain to me, right, because I know nobody was working for me in 2020 in that business. And so I started throwing away and and I thought better,” Neville said.

Then he says his confusion turned to anger.

“Who the hell is trying to scam me?”

And he’s not alone.

Rebecca Ruth Chocolates owner Charles Booe says in the last week he’s received three notices from the state of people trying to claim unemployment through his business. People he says who’ve never worked there and he doesn’t know and yet, he’s still he’s not surprised.

“With everything being done remotely it opens up a lot of opportunity for identity theft. So, I’m not terribly surprised no actually,” Booe said.

But he was surprised to see someone claimed to be him.

“The first notice I got was in my home that I had filed for unemployment. News to me,” he said.

Neville and Booe say, as of now, The Unemployment Insurance Office is hard to reach, if it all, to resolve these claims. A familiar complaint of countless people dealing with what the state admits is an antiquated system.

“This is no disrespectful tone towards state employees, but if they ain’t got it fixed, they ain’t going to in a year,” Neville said.

Monday, Beshear announced an Unemployment Insurance Fraud Detection and Prevention task force to stop the fraud.

And, both business owners hope that it will speed up communication.

“We’re in the dark, we don’t know what’s happening with these claims and we’re not getting responses in real time, so I would just say getting responses would be the thing that really needs to happen,” Booe said.

The state also says it has updated its website protections and made it easier to access fraud claims.