Taxpayers Scammed – Social Fraud: From Dead Mothers and Vacation Homes

Hardly any other crime fascinates Mr. and Mrs. Austrians more than social fraud. After all, it’s not the person who gets scammed, it’s all of us. Those who obediently submit their taxes and duties to the Treasury even in bad times. On the other hand, there are those who undermine, twist and outright exploit the system.

This is exactly what a separate group of the Federal Criminal Police Office specialized in four years ago. Under the inconspicuous abbreviation TF SOLBE (Task Force Social Security Fraud), more and more black sheep have been emerging since 2018. The figures that the task force comes up with – and now presents – are a lot more spectacular.

In fact, since the task force’s inception, more and more cases have come to light. Police and finance work hand in hand. Social fraud is a classic crime of control, as Minister of the Interior Gerhard Karner and Minister of Finance Magnus Brunner explained, among others. In other words, the higher the search pressure, the more offenders are caught. This is now reflected in the current figures.

Vienna as the focal point, 70 percent of the perpetrators from abroad
In a federal state comparison, the capital is way ahead: more than half of the fraud cases discovered since 2018 were reported in Vienna, followed by Upper Austria and Styria. In Burgenland there were only 80 violations. The gap is also large when you look at the origin of the perpetrators: 70 percent come from abroad, only 30 percent are Austrian.

The offenses range from surreptitiously obtaining minimum income despite having sufficient assets, through misuse of pension benefits, to unlawfully collecting child benefits (see below).

Died mother under cat litter in the basement
Social fraud rarely happens by accident. There’s a lot more callousness, ice-cold calculation and, of course, criminal energy behind it. A judge upheld the latter for a 67-year-old in Tyrol: the academic kept his late mother’s body in the basement for more than a year in order to continue collecting the 89-year-old’s pension and health care benefits. years old (minimum 4,000 euros per month).

The matter only came to light when the postman changed – the new postman insisted on handing the money to the woman in person. At that point, the deceased had been hiding in the basement for 15 months under ice packs and cat litter…

Syrian drug dealer hidden belongings
A 35-year-old Syrian is also behind bars. Although because of drug trafficking, it is determined in parallel, but also because of social fraud. The man received cash payments, although he has significant assets in his home country.

17 apartments and villas in Croatia
And then there is the Bosnian woman who rents 17 holiday apartments and a villa in Croatia, but received unemployment benefits and emergency aid in Austria.

Focus action against wage dumping in Tyrol
Incidentally, the financial and immigration police in Tyrol are currently taking action against undeclared work and wage dumping. “Due to the shortage of workers, more and more companies are resorting to workers sent to Austria by foreign companies,” said Finance Minister Brunner. However, as the audits show, these companies do not comply with legal requirements – which in turn means hefty fines for local companies.

At the beginning of July, for example, three Bosniaks were found at a cleaning company in the Tyrolean lowlands who had been ‘mediated’ from Croatia. The financial police found that the trio had neither a residence or work permit nor any form of social security…