Bonnie Tom is newly married and excited about the next chapter in her life.
She had been saving money to possibly buy a home, but the state of California recently took away almost all of her savings.
“I just want the best future for my spouse and I, and the fact that someone could take everything away from me is pretty terrifying,” she said.
It all started two years ago when the state was disbursing a huge amount of Employment Development Department benefits, and much of that money — roughly $19 billion — ended up in the hands of scammers who stole identities and filed fake unemployment benefit claims.
That’s exactly what happened to Tom. Scammers used her name to file claims and scammed her out of all her money. She found out when she received a letter in the mail from the EDD confirming a change of address for her benefits. Tom says she filed a police report and reported the scam to the EDD multiple times.
“I simply decided that I needed to do so in order to gain evidence and proof to clear my name,” she said.
But it didn’t work: Recently, Tom said the EDD withdrew $24,000 from her bank account without any warning, alleging that it had filed bogus claims with the EDD.
“I just felt hopeless. I felt like there was nothing else I could do at this point because I’d taken so many steps to try and resolve this issue. And no one would call me back or contact me about this issue,” she said.
The I-Team contacted the EDD and they refunded all of that money back to Tom’s account.
“I screamed!” Tom said.
The I-Team wanted to know if the EDD had fraudulently withdrawn money from the bank accounts of other Californians, but the EDD said it either didn’t have that data or couldn’t provide it for privacy reasons if it did. The department said it has recovered roughly $6 billion in fraudulently obtained benefits and convicted hundreds of fraudsters.
As for Tom’s case, the EDD apologized for “any inconvenience” she experienced.
“The fact that they’re punishing the actual victims instead of going after the people who stole from EDD in the first place seems unreasonable to me,” she said.