PHOENIX — Ashley Smith’s mother got her debit card for Arizona jobless benefits in the mail Monday.
There was one problem: Pamela Smith died three years ago at the age of 62.
The mail drop included a second, similar letter from the Department of Economic Security: For a woman who’s never lived at Ashley Smith’s north-central Phoenix home.
“It just blew my mind,” Smith said in an interview Tuesday. “I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Smith was concerned she might break the law by opening the second piece of mail.
But she had larger worries about the hackers who likely applied for the benefits and might have been lurking by the mailbox.
“It alarms me that people are scamming DES and succeeding,” she said.
“There are people who are seriously in need, begging for assistance, and can’t even get a hold of DES.”
The bogus debit cards are just the latest sign of a massive fraud problem that’s plagued DES for several weeks.
DES says it’s flagged hundreds of thousands of jobless claims as potentially fraudulent and closed thousands of debit card accounts. But the crackdown has also hurt people with legitimate claims.
“It is a huge mess,” Smith said. “There’s another term I’d like to use for it, but it involves curse words.”
A DES spokesman issued this statement:
“The Arizona Department of Economic Security has seen a significant increase in fraudulent activity in which individuals are filing unemployment insurance claims using stolen personal information. Individuals who suspect UI fraud can submit a report here.
"...Claims for PUA continue to rise, and hundreds of thousands of these claims have been flagged as potential fraud and will need further review. We have made significant progress in identifying case types and patterns to release payments to those claims that were filed to eligible unemployed Arizonans in need of this critical assistance, and we will continue to balance the need to serve our communities with program integrity."
DES says Ashley Smith can destroy the debit cards.
The agency will investigate.