This article is from page 4 of the 2009-04-14 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 4 JPG
GARY* has spent time in jail, not for holding up banks or riding around in stolen cars. The Clareman’s crime is one he says he “fell into” while he was unemployed.
“I discovered how easy it was to pretend to be someone else. It was as simple as that.”
It’s some years ago now, but Gary is one of many people who defrauded the social welfare system and by the time he was caught up with, he was drawing the dole under seven names every week.
“It started when my flatmate de- cided to go to Australia. We were living in Dublin at the time. He was fed up not being able to get work and his parents were well off, so he bor- rowed money to go travelling. The night before he went, he said – jok- ing – that I could draw his dole for him. Anyway, there must have been a mix-up because, a few days later, a payment slip arrived through the door in his name. The post office where he collected his money was a big one and there were a lot of tellers working there so I thought I’d chance it and it worked. Nobody asked me for ID or anything.”
Gary kept collecting the payments for a couple of weeks but stopped when one of the tellers seemed to be suspicious and asked for ID.
A few weeks later, Gary admitted to a friend that he had fraudulently collected his pal’s payments.
“He just laughed. He told me he was claiming for three people. All you had to do is to use the names of people who had left the country or people around your own age who had died. You just applied for a birth cert and walked in with the cert as identification. He made claims in dif- ferent areas using different friends’
addresses. That’s how easy it was dete
Gary became even more ambitious with the emergence of cheap flights to Britain.
“I could get to London for 20 quid and even use the same birth certs I used here as ID to claim the dole over there. I was cleaning up. All I needed were the certs and a couple of pals’ addresses in London. It was worth my while to fly over and back
to make claims and cash payment slips or cheques.”
Gary was caught when a computer check made by one conscientious British civil servant matched a new claim made by him to an existing claim address. The matter was fol- lowed up and CCTV revealed that one person was collecting both al- lowances. He had no means of pay- ing the money back and served three months in jail in the UK.
“Tm not proud of what I did and it wasn’t worth going to jail for. But in the end, it wasn’t rocket science and I was fed up being poor the whole time. There are a lot of people still making double claims or claim- ing and working at the same time. I wasn’t the only one at it.”
* Name has been changed to protect his identity.