A security firm investigating California’s fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims warned that the scope of the fraud could be more than twice as much as previously estimated. At least 10 percent of unemployment claims may have been fraudulent before the state Employment Development Department (EDD) installed controls last October, according to Blake Hall, founder and chief executive of the company ID.me., reported the Los Angeles Times. Hall’s company was hired by the EDD in October and had blocked nearly 470,000 phony claims ever since. Hall told the L.A. Times that the amount of fraudulent payout between March and September 2020 could reach $9.8 billion. The EDD has sent out $113 billion in unemployment benefits since March, when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic hit California. He added that a lot of those moneys went to foreign crime organizations that filed unemployment claims with stolen identity information, and then used “money mules” …