State officials said they are dealing with a new type of fraud targeting the unemployment system.>> Download the FREE WMUR appAuthorities said they have a unit that is dedicated to investigating this fraud, and what they’ve seen is historic.Criminals have taken advantage of the pandemic to target unemployment systems all over the country with false benefit claims, officials said.“The type of fraud that we’ve seen is all related to identity thefts, and so that’s a different type of fraud than we’ve seen before, and it’s really the result of these large scale data breaches,” Richard Lavers, deputy commissioner of New Hampshire Employment Security, said.Those breaches usually target large retailers and result in the theft of hundreds of thousands of identities.Lavers said since the start of the pandemic, New Hampshire has seen about 10,000 of these fraudulent claims, but they’ve been able to sniff out almost all of them.“In 99% of these cases, we’ve detected the fraud prior to it paying out. So other states have not been as fortunate. We’ve seen other states that have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars,” Lavers said. New Hampshire has paid about 100 fake claims worth $370,000, Lavers said. That money is gone.“These are dollars that the state will never be able to collect. These are dollars that will quickly find their way offshore and they’re not dollars that we’ll ever be able to recoup,” Lavers said.Lavers said the public can also help by practicing good internet security and reporting anything that’s unemployment-related and looks suspicious.

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