Alex Trelinski
A VALENCIA area woman has been given a two-year prison sentence and ordered to repay €135,805 to Social Security after her claiming her dead brother’s pension for 24 years.
She also has to pay a daily fine of €4 for seven months and will have to cover all legal costs of her trial.
The Valencia Provincial Court ruled that she hid her brother’s death ‘with the intention of illicit enrichment’.
The fraudster had custody of her brother prior to 1996- the year he died- and he received an annual orphan’s pension of over €8,000.
Despite passing away on May 1, 1996, the pension continued to be paid into a CaixaBank account until March 2020 when she informed Social Security that her brother had just died.
Inquiries were carried out which exposed the woman’s long-running fraud as she syphoned off the illicit income through cash withdrawals, card payments, and direct debits.
Social Security recovered €38,970 directly from the bank which according to the Valencia court judgement ‘did not carry out compliance with its obligation of annual verification of the survival of the pension holder’.
Further details about the convicted woman have not been disclosed.
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