Benefits staff told to pay foreign crime gangs hundreds of millions after ... trends now

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Benefits staff were ordered to pay tens of millions of pounds to foreign criminals during the pandemic – despite suspecting fraud, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Senior civil servants told staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) who sounded the alert to make the payments, according to Government whistleblowers.

Investigators working for the department say benefits bosses operated a policy of 'blindly trusting' all applications at face value – including claims made using fake IDs by Romanian criminal gangs and fraudsters from other Eastern European countries.

Last week, the DWP admitted losing £6.4 billion to fraud in the past year, down from a record £6.5 billion in 2021/22. Almost £300 million of the latest total was committed from abroad – much of it suspected to involve organised crime. 

The DWP blamed fraudsters 'taking advantage of temporary easements... during the pandemic to pay people who needed help'.