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At the FBI, Steven Merrill, chief of its Financial Crimes Section, tells AARP that the threat posed by these criminals is “pervasive” and every state is potentially at risk. He is a 29-year

veteran of the bureau. "There's not a quote-unquote ‘hot spot.’ They're all hot spots,” Merrill says. Noting that multiple states were involved, he declined to identify them.

"We—the FBI—along with our partners are working with the states and trying to get to the bottom of who perpetrated these frauds, and we're trying to stop them,” he adds. Merrill

did say that foreign internet protocol (IP) addresses had turned up during the ongoing investigations; these numerical labels are assigned to devices on computer networks. The FBI's

allies include numerous government, law enforcement and financial-sector partners. “I really want the public to understand that we do these things as a team,” says Merrill, who expects down

the road there will be criminal charges for illicit conduct including wire fraud, identity theft and computer intrusions. Filing a false unemployment claim in itself is a crime. These

alarming trends come as joblessness has reached heights not seen since the Depression. More than 50 million Americans have filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits during the

pandemic, so the crime wave is taxing already heavily burdened state unemployment offices. In addition to Maryland, Washington state has been a prime target of the identity thieves making

bogus jobless claims, and attacks also have occurred in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Wyoming,

news accounts show. Meantime, Colorado, Illinois and Kentucky have warned unemployment claimants that their personal data may have been exposed in data breaches. STICKY-FINGERED OUTLAWS