Okay, first of all, get out of your persecuted mind set, and quit with the nightmare and desperation malarkey. Unemployment insurance is not, and has never been a needs based program. Just because you're desperate and had to draw your 401K out and didn't get unemployment these weeks does not mean they're out to get you. Unemployment is strictly based on eligibility, determined by the examination of wage records and evidence given by the claimant and/or the employer. They have certain time limits to return these decisions. What you do for income in the meantime isn't relevant.
What has happened is that there has been some sort of misunderstanding, and you're having to explain the situation to them in order to reopen your claim. Okay, what you did, apparently, was call up the unemployment system and tell them you had a job, right? So you stopped your claim or requested that they stop your claim. This was not really necessary. Usually when you do it, they tell you to go on and file weekly certs up until the first week you have actually worked for the new company. Then you stop filing. But even though you received a formal job offer, or were told that you had a job, you still were eligible and should have kept filing for weeks of benefit until you had actually worked for this new employer a week.
What happens is that even though you've been told you're hired somewhere, you file claims for unemployment weeks (after they have passed, of course) as you are supposed to, until after the first week you have actually gone to work for this company and are going to be paid for the work you did. That first week, you look back, you've worked Sunday through Saturday, you'll be paid for it later, and therefore you simply do not file a certification for that week.
Any break in the claim certification process, any week you fail to file a certification will stop your claim. Before you can get any more benefits, you must request that your claim be reopened, and you will be given a new decision about the new job you have just accepted, worked at and then apparently, from the looks of things (at least on the surface) have quit.
A quit will disqualify you for unemployment benefits, unless you had a valid work related reason to quit the job. From the sound of this, either you did not actually work for this employer AT ALL, or you worked (you thought) and were not paid. Either way, your valid work related reason to quit should be that this employer proving to be part of some sort of scam, which I'm not clear about...what exactly were they doing to you? Other than getting all your information, they assured you that you were going to work, right?
But I am not totally comprehending what happened here. Did you actually work for this company any? Did you just receive a job offer to start so and so, or did you actually do work for them? It doesn't really sound like it, but did you? If so, then did you call the employment office back when you stopped working for them? Did they give you a decision saying you were now ineligible because you had quit a job? You say something about "three weeks later they affirmed their decision" but you don't mention what happened before that. Okay, so you received an initial decision denying benefits, right? You have then appealed THAT decision, right? So you've been denied twice since you tried to reopen the claim?
At this point, I'm not hearing anything that you're going to get another appeal if they don't approve the one you have filed recently. So "how can I get them to believe me?" is sort of a hopeless question here if what you've told them in the last two appeals are not getting the job done. I don't understand what you're telling them that is causing them to think you worked for wages and then quit the job, why they cannot see this job as a fraud. Have you provided them with the legitimate company's information so that they can talk to them about this scam?
They can, at some point, check very thoroughly to see if you received any wages from this company. They do not use your weekly certifications that you kept filing after you had stopped your own claim(?????) as proof you were not working or that you had no income. People tend to lie about these things sometimes. What you said on the weekly certification is not proof of anything.
But if this scam is getting your information through your postings on the state's employment system computers, the whole department should have some awareness of what is happening, should be able to see that you are one of the people who was scammed in this situation. Are there others?
It should work itself out eventually, but that you haven't received any checks while you were working it through the appeals process, and it has taken six to eight weeks is just the way it works. Even though you may be desperate, they don't take that into consideration. They just do the appeals as prescribed.
If you are approved to re open your claim, you should be back paid for these weeks you've been certifying for while the decisions were being made. But unemployment insurance isn't supposed to keep you from starving. It's not something you can count on to receive timely and keep you out of a financial crisis when you're having to appeal something. They didn't ask you any income questions when you filed, do not care if your wife makes $900,000 a year at her job, if ou are a trust fund baby or if you've lost your job and down to the last nickel you've got in your pocket.
But what I'm missing is exactly what happened between your accepting this job and telling the unemployment office you had a job and when you began filing weekly certifications for benefits. When did you tell them differently, and what was their decision, what does it say? And exactly what has taken place since then? It shouldn't be this hard to "make them understand."