On Tuesday, August 29 I filed online for unemployment, since I no longer work at the Olea Hotel. On Friday, September 1 I received a letter from EDD (the California unemployment office) telling me that they could not confirm my identity, to make sure the Social Security number they listed was mine (it was) and to send them six out of the following ten items of identification. They indicated that perhaps my identity had been compromised.
On Saturday morning, September 2, I took to the the post office the six pieces of identifying items, in the envelope they provided, and mailed it to EDD. That afternoon I received from EDD the notice of my benefits, which are ZERO, and that the earnings from the past year were ZERO, and that my claim for these zero benefits would expire in a year.
Nice. Zero benefits. Now, of course there is something amiss with this. When I filed online I was required to enter my earnings for many quarters of 2016 and for some of 2017. I dutifully did so. Somehow all that information has magically disappeared.
And here's another tricky bit of information: when I filed online, I was also required to enter a user name and a password and an email address. I did, but I had to change the password since it had been 8 years since I filed last. I wrote down the user name and the password because they require you to use numbers, caps, characters and I knew I would not remember all that. I also wrote down my claim number. Today I could not access my account with that user name or password and the system said my email address was not valid.
Sigh. In some fashion I have been hacked or have fallen through the cracks or something. I tried pulling a free credit report but they won't provide it online, and I have no printer and thus no way to print it out. But the questions they asked were very bizarre and I had to answer NO to all of them. In other words, all the questions they asked about credit or bank cards I had ("Did you open a credit card account in June of 2014 with one of these companies?") were not valid.
I will call EDD on Tuesday, of course, and try to get to the library or someplace where I can print out the credit reports and see if someone is using my name and SSN. Maybe that's not the case, maybe it is. I have no idea.
Combined with the End of Days heat we are having, it's no wonder I spent an hour looking at used RVs, fighting the desire to get in a car and just leave.
More to follow. Maybe.
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