Scammers have racked up an estimated $8 billion in benefits and taken from the pockets of a million and a half genuinely unemployed people, who then find themselves locked out of their accounts, as California’s unemployment fraud spirals out of control.

At first we thought it was funny when a Roseville woman used Dianne Feinstein’s name and social security number to scam $21,000 in fraudulent unemployment benefits. Though it seemed more serious when tens of thousands of prison inmates' names were fraudulently used to raid California unemployment funds intended for out-of-work gig workers, in what Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said “appears to be the most significant fraud on taxpayer funds in California history.” At the time of those November and December reports, Bank of America estimated that the fraud totaled about $2 billion.    

That figure now looks like peanuts, KGO reports that the new estimate is $8 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits lost to scams. And the burden falls on the genuinely unemployed individuals, with Sacramento's KXTV noting that some 1.4 million unemployed Californians have been locked out of their accounts.

A particularly cruel ‘double-dip’ variant of the fraud has hit Bank of America customers, as explained in the above segment from KGO. Hackers crack into an Employment Development Department (EDD) account, essentially one’s benefits card and access to money, racking up mysterious charges in this case from a company called “WHOGOHOST - WEST AFRICA.” Then Bank of America locks the customer out of their legitimate account, letting the customers hang in the lurch with no access to money.

“Seven thousand dollars taken out of my account. It hurts,” unemployed bartender Diane Davis told KGO. “I’m on hold for three hours, then you finally get someone on the phone, and click, you get disconnected.”

It got worse. She then attempted to log into her own account, and was greeted with a big red X and the message “Your account cannot be accessed.” (After KGO’s report, Davis did get access to her account and funds reimbursed.)

"EDD has become an absolute catastrophe," Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA) told KXTV. " Every week that innocent people go without their unemployment check, they're making it more difficult for folks to buy groceries and pay rent, pay their mortgage. And the fact that this agency after a year still can't figure out the difference between fraud claims and legitimate needs is incredibly frustrating."

KXTV, who have really been on this story given their Sacramento focus, explains that there is a way to appeal EDD’s ruling if you’re locked out of your account. Unsurprisingly, it’s the kind of process where you could more quickly remove your own appendix. You have to submit a paper appeal form, and then wait for a field office to schedule you a phone interview to make your case. An employment expert tells KXTV that “The general overturn rate is over 50 percent in favor of the claimant,” which is great, except you’d rather unemployed people just not have to go through the nightmare in the first place.

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Image: Job seekers look at job resource pamphlets during the "Put Your Talent to Work" job and resource expo December 17, 2008 in Concord, California. The California Employment Development Department hosted the job fair that was geared towards unemployed contruction, real estate and mortgage workers. Over 1,200 people attended the event that had been expected to draw closer to 400. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Unemployment remains at just 3.2 percent in San Francisco as of the end of January, however that is up from 2.9 percent in December, and a whopping 6,900 lost their jobs in that one-month span, as Socketsite reports — marking the single biggest month-to-month drop since 2009.

That may sound scary, but Socketsite also puts it in perspective by noting that there are 103,600 more people with paychecks living in the city than there were in January 2010 — kind of a shocking figure.

Meanwhile, in January 2017, employment dropped by 7,200 in Alameda County, but that followed an upward revision of the number of employed people in December, but still even with that dip the number of employed people in the county is 12,500 higher than at the same time last year.

We've all been expecting a market correction of some kind to hit us, and that appears to be happening in small ways like the major layoffs at Zenefits last month, the January layoffs at Munchery, and that small round of layoffs at Twitter last fall.

And the tech economy can't be doing too terribly if Snap Inc. could arrive with such a frenzy on Wall Street, giving it a better opening day than Google, Facebook, or Alibaba, and making CEO and founder Evan Spiegel — don't let this depress you — officially richer than Oprah.

80 initiatives and referenda and are out and about around the state with advocates trying to collect enough signatures so they can qualify for an upcoming election ballot. You might see people at farmers markets asking you to support the initiative for state parks or maybe you signed the one to legalize marijuana, which has already been turned in and will appear on the November ballot, pending signature verification.

A handful of new initiatives were cleared for signature gathering yesterday, the Secretary of State announced. If approved for the ballot, voters will be asked to prohibit voting for some, weaken environmental laws during high rates of unemployment and make it harder for taxes, levies and charges to be imposed by the state legislature. Here are the summaries of each:

Yikes.

After Carole Migden was heard "berating" her Capitol staff yesterday, they were told to stay home today. Egads, right? According to Sacto Bee:

Enedina Hidalgo, the director of personnel for the state Senate, overheard Migden screaming, according to a witness to the event. The source said she entered the office while the senator was not present on Thursday, informing the staff of their rights.

Soon after, Hidalgo returned to Migden's office with Tony Beard Jr., the chief sergeant-at-arms of the state Senate. They told the staff to pack up their belongings and escorted them out of the building, the witness said.

Dude.

Carole, of course, denies that her staff was sent home. The infamously "brusque" Sen. declined further comment.

If you recall, Migden lost a three-way Democratic race to Mark Leno earlier this year. Was that the cause of her alleged hysteria? We're dying to know what she was screaming about this time. Oh, that Carole.

(By Eyleen Tavy)

Don't ask us what we were doing reading the Wall Street Journal this morning (aside: have you ever looked at Kevin Sprouls', the guy who does the Journal's portraits, other work? Love it!), but when we read this article on how those damned Bulgarians are stealing American web ad production jobs our blood started to boil.

Until recently, Web ads were produced mostly by creative types in downtown lofts in places like New York City or San Francisco. But big marketers are now increasingly shipping off that work to little-known businesses in places like Costa Rica and Bulgaria.

NO! Will San Francisco's "downtown lofts" be the next Flint, with grizzled "creative types" standing in line for federally supplied cheese (aren't most creative people lactose intolerant, or does it just seem that way)?

- Marketing Communications Associate (H5)

- iPhone Media Engineer (Apple)

- DBA / Data Analyst (Oak River Insurance Co.)

- Marketing Assistant (International Museum of Women)

- Outreach Coordinator (On Lok)

- Senior Technical Recruiter, Engineering Leadership (Google)

...and many, many more found right here. Joyous hunting to those in need.