A Bulgarian man conned the British taxpayer out of £2.2 million in an audacious scam that involved flying fellow Bulgarians into Britain and shuttling them to Jobcentres to pose as benefit claimants, before flying them home again.
Over a four-year period, from 2020 to 2024, Tanyo Danchev used the names and identities of his fellow countrymen to claim Universal Credit.
He organised for his Bulgarian associates to travel by plane to the UK, where he would pick them up at the airport and drive them to Jobcentres to fill in benefits claims in person, before returning them to the airport.
Earlier this month, Danchev, 39, was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to 29 counts of fraud by misrepresentation at Snaresbrook Crown Court.
Fraud investigators at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) found that he controlled the bank cards of the other Bulgarians involved in the scam and withdrew cash from their accounts of £2.2 million pounds.
Arrest and charges
The Bulgarians were not entitled to claim Universal Credit as they were not resident in the UK, the investigators found, and the companies they claimed to be working for had been set up falsely and were not trading. Danchev, who had set up a number of businesses in Bulgaria, also claimed benefits for himself.
Following a DWP investigation, Danchev was arrested when he arrived in the UK in July this year, after being caught with eight bank cards relating to benefit claimants.
His case is not the first major benefit scam involving Bulgarian nationals. Earlier this year, a Bulgarian gang was convicted of Britain’s largest benefit fraud, costing the taxpayer more than £50 million.
Five Bulgarian nationals pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering for their involvement in a multi-million-pound scam on the benefit system.
The five defendants, who “systematically plundered” the UK’s welfare system, were jailed for a total of 25 years and five months.
False claims were made using an array of forged documents for Universal Credit involving real people who were “nearly always living in Bulgaria” and who “were complicit and also gained financially”.
