Group of fraudsters involved in £1.7million benefit fraud scheme using 188 FAKE kids are jailed

A fraudster from Manchester cheated the child benefit and tax credit system out of more than £1.7 million pounds ... with claims for 188 FAKE children.

Ali Bana Mohamed used relatives and friends from Birmingham and London to assist in the scam. This involved submitting bogus claims in about 70 different names.

They got away with the brazen scheme until suspicions were aroused by the HMRC. The tax office spotted that the same two telephone numbers were repeatedly calling the tax credits claims call centre in connection with seemingly unrelated claims and a dedicated DWP investigation was launched.

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On Thursday (March 3) six of the fraudsters received jail sentences totalling more than 13 years. One of them having his term suspended.

Judge Brian Cummings, QC praised the investigating DWP officers for “their skill and determination in their investigation.”

The mastermind 40-year-old Ali Bana Mohamed, of Epping Street, Hulme, Manchester, was jailed for three and a half years in January after admitting 29 fraud offences. He was already serving 16 years for drugs and immigration offences and the judge, who ordered the sentence to run consecutively, said it would have been longer but for his existing sentence.

Liverpool Crown Court heard that the defendants lived in Manchester, Birmingham and London. They are all Somalian but come from a specific area with its own dialect of Bravenese and were assisted by the only Bravenese interpreter in the country.

Kevin Slack, prosecuting, told the court that the defendants were in the dock as part of Operation Paratrooper which involved an investigation by the DWP’s Serious and Organised