Organised crime targets benefit fraud

More detail has been released about mortgage frauds which were uncovered following an investigation into benefit frauds in Ipswich. We looked at this in June last year.

Nine people are on bail after being quizzed by police following raids on their homes, reports Ipswich's Evening Star.

The current investigation involves an alleged scam worth at least £6m by people who are said to have taken out inflated mortgages on properties at the Persimmon Homes' Orwell Quay development at Ipswich waterfront, before pocketing the difference.

The suspected fraud uncovered by the Ipswich Borough Council investigators led to the discovery of similar alleged swindles around the country in Manchester, Nottingham, Stoke, Leeds and Thamesmead near Dartford.

A series of inquiries headed up by City of London police are now under way. They are said to involve 10,000 victims with potential losses running into hundreds of millions of pounds.

There follows a review of how the investigation started, which rehashes what we knew before.

What we get now is names around the alleged mortgage frauds, which it turns out have hit the national press.

This week's arrests centre around Eastbourne Financial Services Limited (EFS), a mortgage brokers based in East Sussex, which is currently in liquidation. The investigation involves mortgages taken out with Bradford and Bingley.

We are told this is part of an ongoing investigation into a mortgage fraud affecting mortgages taken out on more than 500 properties in the South of England between 2005-2007.

The two central issues remain unresolved. The first is that the investigations are taking a long time and one wonders when anything will come to trial.

The second is the scale of benefit fraud. The perpetrators here made a slip. But how much is organised crime quietly extracting from the benefits system every week?

Even amateurs do pretty well out of benefit fraud. £2bn a year is a lot of rich pickings.