DENVER — Before the state gets duped and pays a fake unemployment claim, someone needs to pretend to be unemployed.
That happened to two Coloradans who helped stop the state from paying a fake claim.
“Back in December of 2020, I got an email a few days before Christmas from Colorado Unemployment saying that they had received my claim and would be in contact with me, but I had not received a claim and I was gainfully employed at the time,” Lisette Marlowe, a Denver resident, said.
Marlowe reported the fraudulent unemployment claim using her identity almost three years ago.
That is now preventing her from getting the legitimate unemployment claim that she now needs to file.
“I work in an industry that is pretty niche, and so it’s hard to find another job, but I’m working on it,” Marlowe said. “I was a digital forensics project manager. It sounds a lot cooler than it is. I pretty much talked to lawyers all day.”
She got laid off just a few weeks ago, and when she filed for unemployment, she found out that she could not.
“They said that I would need to wait at least 20 or 21 days from August 9 for them to even start investigating,” Marlowe said.
Even though she reported the fraud in 2020, it was never deemed fraudulent until she reached out again this month.
“The 21 days are triggered by the formal decision being issued. Just reporting a claim as fraudulent is not enough to issue a decision of fraud,” a spokesperson with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) said. “Antiquated federal law requires the Division to provide the claimant (in this case, the fraudster) 21 days to appeal a decision that was not in their favor.”
“I have less than one months’ rent in my bank account that was given to me by two complete strangers on Reddit,” Marlowe said.
She does not regret the effort she made to keep the fraudulent claim from being paid out in 2020.
“I spent a couple of weeks staying up on Saturday nights until it hit midnight on Sunday so I could call into the phone line and report that I had worked the entire week, just trying to make sure that they didn’t pay out anything on it,” Marlowe said. “I just didn’t want the bad guys to win. I didn’t want them to pay it out to somebody fraudulently who would get it at the expense of Coloradans.”
The same thing happened to Westminster resident Andrea Nozykowski.
“Somebody had my social security number and had filed unemployment with the state,” she said.
Nozykowski also caught fraud attempted in her name back in April. She reported it to the state immediately.
“Nothing came of it. I got an email that just said if they needed any more information that they would be in contact with me. And I didn’t hear anything,” Nozykowski said.
Just last month, she lost her job in wine sales.
“I really thought I was going to be immune to the layoffs,” said Nozykowski. “Most people were down 20-30% and I was up 8.5% and I still got laid off.”
She received another unexpected surprise when she tried to file for unemployment.
“I went to file for unemployment with the state, and at first, it said it was going to send me an email because I already had an account, which I thought was strange because I had never filed for unemployment before,” Nozykowski said. “I’m staring at my email for like 20 minutes and then it dawns on me that it didn’t go to my email, it went to the email that was fraudulent in the first place. So, I panicked all over again.”
She reached out to the state, but is still locked out of any account to properly file for unemployment.
“They haven’t even given me a timeframe. I’m going on six weeks of being unemployed and they told me they can’t even give me an ETA of when this will be resolved,” Nozykowski said.
Just like Marlowe, she does not know why she is having such trouble legitimately claiming unemployment after helping stop a fraudulent payout.
“I was victimized once, and now I feel like the state is just victimizing me all over again because now that I legitimately need to file for unemployment, I don’t have the ability to even file a claim,” Nozykowski said. “Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and going almost two months without even resolution on this, with no end in sight, is starting to get a little scary.”
CDLE said both Nozykowski and Marlowe are caught up in the department’s effort to prevent fraudulent claims. Since the spring, the state moved fraud detection tools to the highest possible level. Since June, unemployment fraud reports have dropped significantly.
“We understand how frustrating this can be for legitimate claimants who are experiencing delays in payment because of these fraud holds. Unfortunately, when a claimant calls into our call center to inquire about their program integrity hold, our representatives are unable to provide specific details on the claim in order to prevent sharing information to ambitious bad actors, who have called in pretending to be the claimant,” said a CDLE spokesperson.
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