HARRISBURG — Mike Consevage came home from work the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend to find two unemployment checks sitting on his kitchen table with his mail.
Consevage, a Harrisburg-based pediatric cardiologist for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, immediately knew something was wrong:
He is employed and never filed for unemployment.
“I said, ‘This had to be a mistake,’” Consevage said in an interview. “So I called my business manager and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ [The business manager] said, ‘That’s funny, another physician had just gotten a similar set of checks.’”
Consevage appears to be the victim of an elaborate, multi-state scheme to steal people’s identities, fraudulently file for unemployment programs, and then route the money to their own bank accounts, intercept paper checks, or deceive unknowing recipients into turning them over.