UK benefits scam builds a Slovak village
A CRIME gang from Slovakia duped unsuspecting families to travel to the UK so they could scam hundreds of thousands of pounds in benefits – and send the cash back to a village known as ‘Smartie Town’.
The profits were funnelled to the 1,000 year-old village of Pavlovce nad Uhom in the Michalove district of Slovakia where they were used to build houses.
The homes are partly funded by the UK taxpayer and local residents have nicknamed them ‘Smarties’ after the chocolate sweets because the houses are painted brightly and in different colours.
When the gang feared UK officials might become suspicious, they changed tactics – sending the migrants to Canada instead to claim asylum and state support there.
The victims, expecting to work legally, had been transported to Britain in coaches. But once they were across the border, the criminals seized their passports and other documents and forced them into domestic servitude, slave labour and welfare fraud – signing up for several state handouts including tax credits.
Gang members arranged housing and took their victims to open high street bank accounts using a ‘translator’ who was also in on the lucrative scam. Benefits were then paid into accounts in the names of the victims but controlled by the traffickers.
The sums of money made by the Eastern Europeans from trafficking victims using this kind of exploitation were huge.
In another case, three Slovakian con artists raked in £ 1.2million by bringing ‘fake mothers’ to Britain to claim benefits falsely.
They persuaded women from their home country to live in the UK and fraudulently claim child and working tax benefits. The family splashed the vast amounts of cash they pocketed on a life of luxury, gambling in casinos and going on spending sprees to buy gold and diamonds. The crooks – Darina Balogova, her husband Marek Balog, and brother Jaroslav Bado – pulled off one of the largest welfare scams of its kind from a terraced house in Chatham, Kent.
Up to 50 women were brought to Britain under freedom of movement rules and groomed to claim falsely that they were working for a temp agency on low wages so they could receive tax credits.
After the gang had exploited the identities of the women, they allowed them to return to Slovakia, retaining control of their bank accounts, passports, national insurance cards and birth certificates.
Balogova – who never worked a day after arriving in Britain – kept around £30,000 in cash at their headquarters in nearby Rochester. At least £60,000 in stolen benefits were transferred back home.
But the scam was finally exposed when the criminals began using a high street stationer’s receipt books to write bogus payslips for the women. HM Revenue & Customs inspectors noticed they were using the same employee number on all the slips.
In November 2011, at Maidstone Crown Court the gang were jailed for tax credit fraud and money laundering. Balogova was sentenced to four-and-a-half years, while Balog was given three-and-a-half years and Bado three years.
‘Made huge sums from trafficking victims’