Times of London, August 23, 2009
Foreign criminals are trafficking children as young as three months old into Britain and using them to defraud the benefits system of millions of pounds, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Children are taken from their families, brought to Britain and used for fraudulent benefit claims involving forged immigration documents and employment records.
In many cases the children are trafficked with the complicity of their parents. They are trained in street crime and placed with unrelated adults to enable fake benefit claims to be paid into accounts controlled by the trafficker.
In a police operation earlier this month in northeast London, four suspected child victims of trafficking from Romania were placed in foster care.
Officers found evidence of suspected benefit crime in excess of £100,000, including one backdated payment to a family for £24,000. In another case using trafficked children, one gang is believed to have forged documents for at least 500 claims worth £4.5m.
It is the first detailed evidence of systematic child trafficking being used to defraud the British benefits system. The money is believed to have paid for the foreign criminals’ mansions and luxury cars in their home towns.
Tandarei, a small town in eastern Romania, is one of the bases of the suspected traffickers. About 100 imposing new homes conservatively valued at £20m have been built over the past five years. British police believe they have been partly funded by benefit fraud.
Operation Golf, the Metropolitan police operation targeting the Romanian gang, has found evidence of a trafficking ring linked to Tandarei.
Unemployed Romanians arriving in the UK are not typically entitled to benefits, but the gangs forge documents providing false work histories and obtain National Insurance numbers. The children are used to claim additional housing benefit, tax credits and child benefit. They can also be presented to council officials or benefit investigators conducting checks.
The claims supplement revenue from other criminal activities such as cashpoint fraud, pickpocketing and shoplifting.
Anthony Steen MP, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on trafficking of women and children, said: “This is an appalling scandal of desperately poor people being trafficked here to siphon off money from the benefits system. The current checks are totally inadequate and there needs to be an EU-wide response. HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) need to get a grip.”
HM Revenue & Customs and the DWP said they conducted thorough checks on fraud.
Original article
(Posted on August 28, 2009)
Comments
Having read a few articles on “Romanian” crime in recent years, I think the London Times has inexplicably, mysteriously, left out one minor detail.
These “Romanian” criminals are not “Romanian”, but Gypsies, the “Roma”, if you wish to be PC.
They aren’t Romanians, they are Roma or gypsies, one of George Soros’s many grievance groups. Maybe Madonna should adopt a crew of them. She certainly has room in her many homes.
People in the Balkan region often see the loopholes in any system and attempt to exploit it. The 500 year history of Ottoman domination is why. The Slavs, and even the Greeks and Albanians had to smuggle and run black-market enterprises to survive. This is why the former countries of Yugoslavia as well as the other Balkan nations have “mafias.” They are just extensions of the old black-market smuggling cultures.
Today, the sappy, open-bordered West just begs to be taken advantave of… in fact, they deserve it for being so dumb.
I doubt that these criminals are Romanian.
I know a lot of Romanians. They are good hard-working people. Unfortunately there is a large ‘Gypsy’ community there too. They are actually of Indian descent and are known as “Roma”. I very strongly suspect these are the “Romanians” in question.
These “Romanian” criminals are not “Romanian”, but Gypsies, the “Roma”, if you wish to be PC.
Please avoid such articles without stating that these people were
It’s hell sure they were Romanian gypsies. There are a lot of
Don’t be mistaken, I admit that Eastern Europeans and in particular
Gypsies are the same on every continent and in country of the world,
As I stated before, gypsies like to emigrate to other unsuspecting countries,
Guess why the word “gypsy” is ungro (english.: hungarian) in Mexico?
Janos
London — May 2009: An estimated 500 African children a year - many of them babies - are being trafficked into the UK where they end up working as virtual slaves, a new investigation has revealed. The children sold by their poor parents for up to $10,000 come mainly from West Africa, but there have been reports of children from other parts of the continent sold into slavery. An undercover reporter working for the Daily Telegraph newspaper was offered several children for sale by their parents in Nigeria: Two boys aged three and five for $10,000, or $5,000 for one, and a 10-month-old baby for $4,000. Teenage girls - including some still pregnant - were willing to sell their babies for less than $2,000. The Telegraph report said that “impoverished African parents are being lured by the traffickers’ promises of ‘a better life’ for their children, thousands of kilometres away in cities including London, Birmingham and Manchester. But, once brought to Britain, the children are used as a fraudulent means to obtain illicit housing and other welfare benefits, totalling tens of thousands of dollars each a year. “From the age of seven, rather than being sent to school, they are exploited as domestic slaves, forced to work for up to 18 hours a day, cleaning, cooking and looking after other younger children, or put to work in restaurants and shops. Some of the children are also subjected to physical and sexual abuse, while others even find themselves accused of being witches and become victims of exorcism rites in ‘traditional’ African churches in Britain.”
Campaigners have now demanded that the UK government and police take “urgent action” to end this “21st century child slavery.” “These children are being abused under our noses in our own country,” said Chris Beddoe, the director of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, a British-based coalition of international charities. “It is totally unacceptable. We need urgent action to identify these children as they enter the UK, find those who are being abused and offer proper protection to those who escape or are freed from their abusers.”
Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister responsible for the prevention of trafficking, described child traffickers as “evil” and said anybody who could buy and sell babies was “sick.” “We have tightened our visa requirements and our ports of entry and we are gathering intelligence to help us stop this horrific trade,” he said. The opposition Conservative party, however, says the problem has been well known for some time. David Davis, the Conservative shadow home secretary, said: “The government has utterly failed to take decisive action to tackle human trafficking.”
A recent survey by the government’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre claimed that 330 children, including 14 aged under 12, many of them from Africa, had been trafficked into Britain over the past year. The police and campaigners believe, however, that this is just the “tip of the iceberg” and that the true figure is likely to be in the thousands. The traffickers are understood to use a network of corrupt officials and co-traffickers to obtain passports and visas, often giving the children new names.
The campaigners said that many of the slave children - psychologically and often physically damaged at 18 - were thrown out of the houses of their “owners.” They are left to fend for themselves, usually with no papers or documents to prove who they are. With nowhere to turn, many fall into crime and the sex trade. The end result is that many then go on to commit a crime or go to social services for help and are then usually brusquely deported as illegal immigrants. A senior Scotland Yard officer said that part of the problem was that “this is a hidden crime, going on largely in Britain’s African communities and we would urge people in those communities to contact us if they suspect that any child in their area is being abused. We need their co-operation. They must not turn a blind eye.” Godwin Morka, the executive director of Lagos’s anti-trafficking unit, Nathip, told the Telegraph that child trafficking was “rampant” in many Nigerian states. “We know these children are not going to happy homes and we are doing what we can on limited resources.”
Yorkshireman:
I think the reason why the British government hasn’t stopped this is that they’re too scared to take on a racial problem. They’re waiting around for some black to take the leadership so that white Britons can have permission to do something about it. Of course hoping for a black to do that is about as useful as financing next year’s budget with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Any black that could probably has stolen 8-year old Nigerian girls in their kitchens cleaning the oven.
Of course they are Gypsies! http://tinyurl.com/n6cw28
But in the year 2000 BBC reported about “dirt poor” discriminated Gypsies from Tandarei, that must go to the UK to beg for their livelihood there. No nice new houses were mentioned then…http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/680383.stm
Janos, is it possible that there is a substantial ‘Ungro’(Gypsy) presence among the drug gangs that are destroying Mexico?
Honestly, this whole thing reminds me of a vampire movie. I always thought that the vampire mythology had anti-Semitic roots. Now, I’m thinking that the vamps symbolize something else.
No wonder Madonna was booed for ‘defending’ the Gypsies. Next, maybe, she should go to Transylvania and speak out against defamation of Vampires.
all the gypsies can move into madanna’s properties, since she loves them so much.
As a general rule, pretty much every time you hear something bad or criminal about “Romanians”, you can be fairly sure it is the Roma ‘Gypsies’ that are the true culprits. The European Romanians are decent people. This ‘rule’ can be pretty much applied, more or less, to just about all the nationalities of eastern, and in particular, southeastern Europe.
This story about “Romanians” reminds me of case a couple of years ago when there was trouble between English schoolchildren
Honestly, I do not know much about Mexican history,
As far as I know they had difficulties with integrating into the community. I think it tells a lot, that at that time the word about the ungros was that “they steal everything, even babies and small children”
I know nothing about their later history, but once in a TV program about mexico I saw a gypsy (immigrated from Hungary) colony living seggregated. The native communities around the gypsies were well aware of the differences between mexican and gypsy people.
Janos
“I think it tells a lot, that at that time the word about the ungros was that “they steal everything, even babies and small children” — Janos
One shudders to think what happened/happens to such children. They are nothing but slaves. Many are artificially crippled in horrible ways in order to make them more pathetic beggars. The Gypsies will do this to abducted children rather than to their own.
