SAN FRANCISCO—Fifty-nine California lawmakers wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, demanding answers about the frozen credit cards issued from the company.
“Most beneficiaries receive their weekly Unemployment Insurance (UI) or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) funds on a debit card issued and managed by Bank of America under contract with California Employment Development Department (EDD). Over the last six weeks, reportedly due to significant fraud, hundreds of thousands of UI, PUA, and State Disability Insurance (SDI) recipients have had funds taken from their cards or their cards frozen, leaving them unable to access their benefits,” reads the letter.
The lawmaker’s letter pointed out that more than 350,000 residents of California are not allowed to use their UI, PUA, and SDI benefits.
In responding to their letter, Brian Putler, the Director of California Government Relations, wrote for Moynihan saying, “We have collaborated with EDD to help establish additional fraud prevention measures, including implementing a series of filters and flags that indicate suspected fraudulent activity. As a result of these efforts, we have identified more than 640,000 accounts for EDD to evaluate as to whether they are fraudulent, and the associated card should be frozen, or account closed.”
According to Putler, Bank of America is reviewing every claim and when it determines that someone is a legitimate recipient, they restore their money. Also, Putler said that the bank has increased its call staffing to 6,000 personnel.
As a result of their efforts, they have identified for EDD, “76,000 benefits cards sent to recipients in states that do not border California; numerous cases of multiple cards (hundreds in some instances) sent to a single mailing address; multiple cards use a common contact phone number; benefit claims using common email addresses, and benefits issued to infants or children as well as centenarians or other elderly, and to persons unlikely to be recently unemployed.”
Bank of America indicates that most of the 345,000 frozen accounts are deemed fraudulent. The bank indicated that if anyone is interested in reactivating their frozen account, they can contact EDD at https://askedd.edd.ca.gov/.
