Roseville police had arrested Gervais in January on identity theft charges for allegedly obtaining a credit card under false pretenses, but subsequently dropped the charges for lack of evidence, the court filings said. When authorities matched that address in Gervais’ personal claim with those of the suspect claims, investigators began watching her at the wood-sided duplex where the money had been sent. Subsequently, the California EDD received a claim from Gervais in her own name, alleging that her hours as a shelf stocker at Goodwill Industries had been cut. Department of Labor, revealing it had found 17 California unemployment profiles and one claim from Maryland, and had issued 21 prepaid benefits debit cards to those claimants, all going to the same Roseville mailing address as the claim for the senator. The investigation began when fraud investigators with Bank of America, which handles benefits, discovered the Feinstein claim and became suspicious, according to source familiar with the investigation.īank investigators contacted the inspector general of the U.S. “This theft of taxpayer dollars intended to assist our citizens in a very difficult economic time simply will not be tolerated.” attorney for the Eastern District of California, whose office is prosecuting the case. “Unfortunately, these unemployment insurance benefits that were intended for Californians hit hardest by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shutdown have become the target of what may prove to be the largest fraud scheme ever perpetrated against the taxpayers in California history,” said McGregor Scott, U.S.

The benefits were from Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program authorized by the CARES Act to help gig workers, independent contractors and others.

In that request, investigators allege that, in all, 12 claims totaling about $216,000 were paid by the agency, with proceeds sent to Gervais’ home in Roseville, a suburb of Sacramento. Gervais was fired by the agency in October 2018 after an internal investigation implicated her in the theft of a money order, according to a request for a search warrant for her house and car presented to a federal judge on Dec. Court filings say that Gervais formerly worked for EDD from 2010 to 2018 as an office assistant under the name Andrea Dangerfield.

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