Police in the northern German city of Hamburg raided one of the city’s largest refugee accommodation buildings early on Thursday morning, on suspicion of welfare fraud.
Police arrived at around 6:00 am at a building complex in an area of northern Hamburg known as Winterhude on Thursday (June 25). The building they were focused on is known locally as ‘Ukraine House’ and is part of a complex that can house up to around 1,500 asylum seekers and refugees, according to the German press agency dpa.
A total of 200 police officers took part in the operation, which was coordinated by the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit), according to a statement from the Hamburg police department.
The German authorities said they were investigating around 370 cases of suspected cases of child welfare benefit fraud. According to a report on the European news website Euronews, the officers believe that organized criminals have been using the identities of people to claim welfare payments that should not be due to them. The gangs are suspected of having had help from EU citizens too.
Suspects thought to be misusing child welfare support
Officers from the family fund (Familienkasse – which pays out welfare to families in Germany) are currently checking whether all the applications were correctly applied and whether children are really living at the addresses given in the application.
According to reports, the German authorities suspect the involvement of criminal gangs from abroad. They believe they have been using Ukrainian identities to obtain welfare payments in Germany and Poland.
German politicians have been trying to crack down on this kind of crime recently, because they say that while there are many people who need and rely on social welfare support, there are also a lot of problems with the system. This is either because someone might have inadvertently filled out a form incorrectly, perhaps because of problems with the language, but also because there are organized criminal gangs gaming the system, reported Die Welt.
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Criminal gangs
According to Die Welt, the problem of people claiming child support payments for children who are not actually present in Germany is not new. This has been a problem in several other German cities and often the children who are registered on the system are actually in Romania or Bulgaria.
Gangs are also bringing in migrant workers from countries further east and then paying them under the minimum wage, according to Die Welt. These people are then able to register for welfare support, but many of them never see the money they should be getting from the welfare state, as it goes directly into the pockets of those in the gangs.
The German system is often overwhelmed, is not always completely digitized and has so many layers of bureaucracy that there have been a number of cases of people being able to claim huge amounts of money for children that they don’t have or who aren’t living and never have lived in Germany. In a video report on Facebook, Die Welt spoke about a scandal two years ago in the German city of Dortmund, where a man was cashing in child support payments for 24 different children, although he had no children of his own.
'Mr Cash Money' and fake paternity
According to a report from February from the local German public broadcaster WDR, the man known as "Mr Cash Money" had bought several cars and villas on the profits from this scheme. This particular scandal, according to WDR, revolved around a man who had German citizenship and had recognized fatherhood for 24 children, although he was not their biological father.
The children and their mothers then profit from gaining a right to stay in Germany, via the recognition of paternity from a German citizen. Once the children and the mother have the right to stay in Germany, they can then bring other people into the country potentially, and the person who recognizes the paternity is able potentially to cash in the welfare payments intended for the children.
According to WDR, the suspect in this case was receiving 22,500 per month from German welfare support, and reportedly, he wasn’t the only one running this kind of scheme. German authorities estimate that they could be losing around 150 million euros per year via this kind of fraud.
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