Dordrechter helped Bulgarians with childcare benefit fraud

A 61-year-old man from Dordrecht is suspected of defrauding childcare allowance for nearly five million euros. The Public Prosecution Service suspects that Kadir K. helped more than three hundred people, including many Turkish Bulgarians living in the Netherlands or Bulgaria, to apply for benefits from the Tax Authorities from October 2021 to last summer.

The suspect used other people’s DigiD data for these applications. These people had no children registered with a child care agency. According to the Public Prosecution Service, the man received a total of half a million euros for submitting the requests.

“The amount of damage is huge,” said the public prosecutor in the Rotterdam court at the first preliminary hearing. According to the prosecutor, the suspect applied for childcare allowance 330 times for a total of 4.9 million euros. “Although the whole country was still disappointed about the handling of the welfare matter, we see that fraud was being committed in the meantime.”

The man’s case will be dealt with substantially next year. He will be in custody at the moment because the Public Prosecution Service fears that he will otherwise flee to Turkey.

In 2013, the so-called ‘Bulgarian fraud’ came to light. As a result of the law that was subsequently tightened, people had to pay high fines if they paid too much benefit because, for example, they had given wrong information.

The aim was to deal with fraudsters, but many well-intentioned welfare recipients got into trouble as a result. Fines were applied against welfare, meaning that people no longer had an income. Families ended up blacklisted and falsely accused of fraud for years. The benefits situation is still ongoing.