New weekly unemployment claims in state drop to 13,034, state AG forms fraud task force

DENVER — An additional 13,034 people filed for traditional unemployment benefits in the week ending Feb. 27, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment said Thursday, marking a drop of 1,943 from the week prior.

A total of 9,916 people filed for the reinstated Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program during the week, 1,902 more than the week before.

However, the agency broadly warns against relying on new filing figures as a leading economic indicator due to the high number of fraudulent claims made in the past several months.

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A total of 282,986 claims were filed for some type of state or federally-funded unemployment aid in the week of Feb. 20, an increase of 98,231. The department said that spike is attributable to the ongoing restart of certain federal benefits that lapsed in late December.

During a call with reporters Thursday, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said his office is forming a task force with CDLE and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to track down fraudsters who have inundated the state’s unemployment claims system with fake claims for aid in recent months. CDLE has estimated that it identified more than 1.1 million fraudulent claims that were stopped from being paid out since last March.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Colorado office is willing to take referral cases if a fraudulent claim’s source rises to federal levels of prosecution or if the source of a fraud is determined to be out of state.

Weiser said taking advantage of identity theft during a pandemic is something he’s hoping scammers won’t get away with, and he asked for fraud victims to continue reporting incidents as they are discovered.

“It’s atrocious, and we don’t want to allow these scammers to get away with it, which means we also need help from the public,” he said.

Charges for those accused of committing identity fraud can range from high-level misdemeanors to low-to-middle-level felonies and potentially charges under state organized-crime laws if investigators find repeated attempts to collect on fraudulent claims.

However, Weiser warned that any investigation could take a long while before the task force can say it traced fraudulent claims to a large-scale criminal group.

Nationwide, the U.S. Labor Department said 745,000 Americans filed for first-time benefits in the period, an increase of 9,000 from the week prior’s adjusted figure.

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