ATLANTA – Initial unemployment claims in Georgia declined last week, resuming a downward trend that began two months ago, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
The 43,526 first-time claims filed last week was down 5,895 from the previous week, which saw initial claims increase for the first time in eight weeks.
Since March 21, when Georgia businesses began shutting down to discourage the spread of coronavirus, nearly 3.8 million Georgians have filed initial unemployment claims, more than during the last eight years combined.
The labor department paid out almost $14.5 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits during that time.
Last week, the agency issued $669 million in benefits, mostly through a federal program President Donald Trump launched in August after Congress failed to extend an earlier program that expired at the end of July
The labor department paid out nearly $500 million through the Lost Wages Assistance program last week, bringing the total to more than $980 million.
Meanwhile, the agency reminded recipients of benefits to keep a close eye on their unemployment insurance accounts, as they would bank or credit-card accounts.
“We have seen many cases where bad actors possess an extraordinary amount of personal information that they have obtained from the dark web,” state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said Thursday. “A lot of these attacks have a high level of sophistication and are well executed, making it very hard to identify them as fraud by just a cursory glance.”
The labor department is working with a special task force of state and federal agencies targeting individual and organized crime. To help identify potential fraud, the agency encourages Georgians to report fraud and abuse on the department’s homepage under Online Services at www.dol.state.ga.us.
Since March 21, the accommodation and food services job sector has accounted for the most first-time unemployment claims in Georgia with 906,985. The health-care and social assistance job sector is next with 438,821 claims, followed by retail trade with 402,299.
ATLANTA – Georgia will receive more than $1.3 million from a multi-state legal settlement with Anthem stemming from a 2014 data breach that compromised the personal information of 78.8 million Americans.
In February 2015, Anthem revealed that cyber attackers had infiltrated its systems beginning the previous February, using malware installed through a phishing email. The culprits ultimately were able to access Anthem’s data warehouse, where they harvested victims’ names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, health-care identification numbers, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and employment information. More than 3.7 million Georgians were affected.
“We considered many factors before joining this investigation,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said. “It is important to remember that in a world where cybersecurity threats are evolving, so too must our efforts to combat them.”
Georgia and 42 other states participated in the settlement, while totaled $39.5 million.
Under the settlement, Anthem has agreed not to misrepresent the extent to which the company protects the privacy and security of personal information. Anthem also will implement a comprehensive information security program, including specific security requirements with respect to segmentation, logging and monitoring, anti-virus maintenance and access controls.
“We believe Anthem is being an amicable partner in correcting this situation by taking the necessary measures to address the issue at hand,” Carr said.
In the immediate aftermath of the data breach, Anthem offered an initial two years of credit monitoring to all affected Americans.
Prior to the multi-state settlement, the company reached a class-action agreement that established a $115 million settlement fund to pay for additional credit monitoring, cash payments of up to $50 and reimbursement for out-of-pocket losses sustained by affected consumers.
(L-R) Post Doc research scientist David Cotten of the Center for Geospatial Research, Senior computer science and astrophysics major Caleb Adams, Professor of Geography Deepak Mishra, and senior mechanical engineering major Megan Le Corre are working together along with a team of students and professors in a collaborative effort to design, build, and deploy (with the help of NASA) a cube satellite. Adams is holding a 3D printer model of the CubeSat.
ATLANTA – An Antares rocket scheduled for launch Thursday night from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia will carry a small research satellite developed by students at the University of Georgia.
The SPOC, short for Spectral Ocean Color, will monitor the health of coastal ecosystems from space.
The satellite, about the size of a loaf of bread, features an advanced optic system that can zoom in on coastal areas to detect chemical composition and physical characteristics on ocean and wetland surfaces.
UGA students and faculty researchers have been working since 2016 to get the project off the ground. The team won a highly competitive research grant from NASA to secure a spot on the rocket and earn funding.
“I was looking for the most difficult thing I could find and throwing myself at it,” said Hollis Neal, a UGA graduate and one of the founders of UGA’s Small Satellite Research Lab. “That’s a theme with us: We really enjoy a challenge.”
Among the challenges the UGA team had to overcome was a malfunction discovered weeks before a planned launch last March that forced a postponement. After that, the coronavirus pandemic got in the way, shutting down the lab in the spring and summer, then limiting the number of people who could be inside the lab at any one time.
Once in space, SPOC will travel to the International Space Station for deployment into orbit a few weeks later.
“The most important date for our success will be sometime in November when the satellite is actually deployed and the scientific mission begins,” said Deepak Mishra, a UGA geography professor and director of the lab.
UGA hopes to launch a second satellite about a year from now, while a third satellite is in development with help from a local nonprofit.
ATLANTA – Georgia is joining 29 other states in a coordinated crackdown on an alleged fraudulent precious metals scheme that has solicited more than $180 million from seniors and other investors.
Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Wednesday that Georgia and the other states have joined the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission in a federal court petition seeking enforcement action against Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Metals.com.
“We are concerned that the defendants capitalized on investor fear of market instability and economic uncertainty causing investors to suffer substantial losses from retirement savings,” Carr said. “We will continue working together to protect older Georgians.”
“Preying on the elderly and vulnerable is terrible at any time,” Raffensperger added. “Doing so during pandemic-driven economic uncertainty compounds the egregious wrong done to Georgia’s seniors.”
The petition alleges that TMTE Inc., which goes by several other names including Metals.com and Barrick Capital Inc., sold precious metals at grossly inflated prices, targeting elderly investors through traditional and social media and providing unregistered investment advisory services designed to “instill fear in elderly and retirement-aged investors and build trust with investors based on representations of political or religious affinity.”
Investors were advised to liquidate their holdings at registered investment firms to fund investments in precious metals through self-directed individual retirement accounts and bullion coins, the petition said.
The defendants also are accused of failing to disclose, among other things, what Metals.com and Barrick charged investors for their precious metals bullion products and that investors could lose the majority of their funds immediately upon completing a transaction. The defendants charged investors prices for gold or silver bullion averaging from 100%to more than 300% the melt value or spot price of that gold or silver bullion.
In many cases, the market value of the precious metals sold to investors was substantially lower than the value of the securities and other retirement savings investors had liquidated to fund their purchase.
In addition to claims under federal law, Georgia alleges the defendants also violated state securities laws, including failure to register as investment advisors, fraud in the sale of commodities and securities, and the unlawful sale of commodities. Losses to Georgia investors were about $5 million.
The petition asks the court to order the defendants to cease sales activity, return money to investors, and stop defrauding investors and violating federal and state laws going forward.
The attorney general’s and secretary of state’s offices are encouraging investors to come forward if they suspect they have been targeted by similar precious metals investment schemes. Please email [email protected] or call 470-312-2640.
A new poll shows Rev. Raphael Warnock leading one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate races. (Credit: Warnock for Georgia)
ATLANTA – A new poll for the first time shows Democrat Raphael Warnock leading the crowded field vying to complete the U.S. Senate term of retired Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson.
Support for Warnock, the pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, stood at 31% in a poll released Tuesday by the independent Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, appointed to the Senate by Gov. Brian Kemp last December on an interim basis, was second with 23%, followed by U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, at 22%.
Loeffler has held a narrow lead in recent polls of the Senate race, but Warnock has introduced himself to voters in recent weeks with a mostly positive TV ad campaign and has picked up endorsements from prominent Democrats, including former presidents Barack Obama and Georgia’s Jimmy Carter.
Many Democratic leaders have been urging Democrat Matt Lieberman, the son of former Sen. Joe Lieberman, to pull out of the race and leave the Democratic field to Warnock. The Quinnipiac poll had Lieberman running fourth with 9% of the vote.
Loeffler and Collins have been conducting a bitter battle for support from Republican voters, which has split the Georgia GOP and increased the Democrats’ chances of flipping the seat.
With 21 candidates running, a runoff in January is likely between the top two vote-getters on Nov. 3. To win outright in November, the first-place candidate must capture more than 50% of the vote.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s two other key races remain too close to call. According to the Quinnipiac poll, Democrat Joe Biden holds a narrow lead in the Peach State over Republican President Donald Trump, 50% to 47%. That’s close to the poll’s margin of error of plus-or-minus 2.9%.
The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia was Bill Clinton back in 1992.
And in Georgia’s other U.S. Senate race, Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff is barely ahead of incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue, 49% to 48%, well within the poll’s margin of error.
“This Georgia race looms as one of several that could shift the balance of power in the U.S. Senate,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.
The presidential race in Georgia reveals wide gaps in support for the two candidates among demographic groups. Trump is dominating among men 56% to 41%, according to the Quinnipiac poll, while Biden leads among women 57% to 39%.
Trump is the overwhelming choice among white voters 67% to 31%, while Biden’s support among Black voters is even more lop-sided at 89% to 7%.
Georgia independents are backing Biden over Trump 51% to 42%
Quinnipiac interviewed 1,125 likely voters in Georgia, who were surveyed Sept. 23-27.
