Gardai have arrested a man who fraudulently claimed €450,000 worth of social welfare payments using seven different identities.
The Sunday World can reveal that a 39-year-old man from Dublin city has been charged with a string of offences following a joint Garda and social welfare probe.
He was arrested after state-of-the-art facial recognition software alerted social welfare staff to the fact that he had already claimed job seekers allowance using a different name.
Welfare’s special investigation unit launched a probe into the man and observed him over several months going into various offices and claiming the jobseeker’s allowance using seven separate identities.
They also sent through CCTV cameras and gathered evidence of previous fraudulent claims he had made.
Three of the names he used were people from the same family, while the others were from individuals who he did not know but whose identities he assumed.
It has been calculated that his alleged fraud cost the taxpayer close to half a million euro and when he was arrested and taken to Tallaght Garda station, he immediately admitted the offence.
He appeared before Dublin District Court, will be sent forward to the Circuit Court for trial and is facing a jail sentence if convicted.
When gardai carried out an investigation into his background, they determined he had been refused entry to Thailand in 2010 and that several pages of his passport were missing.
He has no criminal convictions and had not come to Garda attention prior to this investigation.
The facial recognition system was introduced last year in a bid to clamp down on welfare fraud which is costing hundreds of millions of euro a year.
Anyone claiming welfare has to stand in front of a camera and their image is recorded and printed onto the newly introduced public services card.
Every time a person goes in to claim payments, another picture is taken and cross referenced with the card to make sure the person is who they say they are.
There has been a massive clampdown on social welfare fraud in recent years with a special fraud tip-off line receiving nearly 25,000 calls last year from members of the public.
Last year, 674 cases were taken against individuals fraudulently making claims and more than one million payments were reviewed by the department. An estimated €632m was clawed back in benefits payments following these various investigations.
The courts are also taking a tough stance on welfare fraud and people are now being jailed for offences.
Earlier this year, the Sunday World highlighted the case of 33-year-old Martin Maughan, who was jailed for three years for a series of welfare swindles. He was pulling in so much money from dodgy claims that he was enjoying a €100,000-a-year lifestyle.
