SALISBURY, Md. - Amy Donohue first noticed the fraudulent unemployment claim when she checked her mail last week.
She says she received a claim from "a gentleman on Thursday. You can return it two ways: You can mail it but these days that's pretty risky. 'Cause it had to be back by Monday. Or you can get on your site and finish it which is immediate. So I did that but this was a gentleman who never worked for us. I have no idea who he is."
Once Amy logged onto the site, she discovered she did not have just one fraudulent claim. "I was quite shocked to find out there were nine other fraudulent claims against our company," Donohue says, "of course I filled these all out that they were fraudulent but unless I had gotten that letter and gotten on my site, I wouldn't have known they were there."
Maryland's unemployment rate dropped to 6.3% last month. That is the lowest is has been since the start of the pandemic. Still, more people are applying for unemployment benefits, which is causing some to take advantage of the overburdened system.
Amy says eight out of the nine claims were from people who never worked for her company, Kitchen Concepts Plus. One person's name, however, did ring a bell.
"One of them is a current employee. He's been with us for multiple years and he never filed it," Donohue says, "so the scarier part now is someone has all of his personal information, his social and they're filing claims on his behalf."
In a statement to WBOC, the Maryland Department of Labor says, "If anyone believes that their information has been used to fraudulently file an unemployment insurance claim, they should immediately contact the Division of Unemployment Insurance's Benefit Payment Control Unit."
