You don’t need loads of evidence, boasts YouTuber charging £650 for tips on how to get state funded cash
FROM a wooden shed at the foot of her garden, Charlotte Anderson runs a lucrative benefits hustle.
Through her YouTube channel, she uses insider know-how to fill out customers’ disability applications – at £650 a pop.
But the hefty price tag comes with a virtual guarantee: she boasts she has ‘only ever lost one claim in six years’.
Ms Anderson, 46, from Bucknall in Staffordshire, has made dozens of videos telling tens of thousands of viewers how to claim benefits, known as Personal Independence Payments, for physical and mental health conditions.
She uses her platform to direct viewers to her digital shop front, which offers paid services ranging from £60 for a ‘document check’ to £650 in exchange for a two-hour meeting and the filling out of an entire claim form.
Ms Anderson receives the maximum PIP – now £798.63 per month – as she has chronic fatigue and severe arthritis. Before that, she worked as a contracts manager at a logistics company.
Now she’s a full-time YouTuber and disability advocate. The self-proclaimed ‘PIP consultant’ also rents out her bungalow and lives in the shed she broadcasts from.
PIP is not means-tested, so Ms Anderson can receive payouts regardless of her income, savings or assets. And business is booming.
In January, she had 33 clients and was forced to temporarily stop offering appointments because the consultancy was ‘too successful’.
Many of her videos open with the declaration that she has a ‘100 per cent success rate at winning PIP’.
Ms Anderson says that, in half of the cases she wins, her clients ‘have purely
mental health conditions’ – as opposed to any physical illness or disability.
In one video about scoring highly on the PIP assessment with a mental health issue, she declares: ‘You have to be able to explain to PIP how you feel, so if you struggle with anxiety you have to explain how it feels for you.’
The YouTuber has also said: ‘People get so obsessed with evidence – you don’t need loads of evidence, you just don’t. No doctor, no specialist, no psychologist can explain how you feel.’
She admits that fraudsters could be watching her videos and using her tips to wrongly win benefits: ‘Yes there are going to be fakers that watch my videos and try to abuse the system – that is PIP’s job to manage that.
‘I know the Department for Work and Pensions are monitoring me… I don’t care.’
Ms Anderson was approached for comment.