Social grant fraud syndicate take-down

The Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations (HAWKS), Crime Intelligence of the SAPS, the Fraud Management and Compliance Department of SASSA, together with a private auditing and accounting firm, today arrested 14 suspects who are part of a social grant fraud syndicate operating within the SASSA grants system.

The syndicate operates inter-provincially and the operation is the biggest one to date. More than 500 cases of ID fraud related to these fraudulent social grants were uncovered during the internal investigation.

These arrests were the first part of the take-down of this syndicate and more arrests are imminent. This collective success was achieved through our consistent multi-disciplinary agency investigative approach that include SASSA’s Fraud Management and Compliance Department, the private auditing and accounting firm, DPCI (Hawks), SAPS Crime Intelligence and the National Prosecuting Authority, Specialised Commercial Crime Unit.

This syndicate is implicated in having defrauded SASSA of more than R2.3 million involving more than 400 social grants. This syndicate forms part of a broader on-going criminal investigation involving more than 4776 fraudulent social grants amounting to more than R34.7 million identified to date. 8 SASSA officials and 14 Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) employees remain under investigation.

Arrested suspects include eight (8) SASSA officials employed at the Matlosane (5), Tlokwe (2) and Krugersdorp (1) SASSA local offices.  All these officials are employed in the Grants Administration Department of SASSA and are responsible for capturing and verifying social grants on SASSA’s SOCPEN system.

Six (6) members of the public, external from SASSA and CPS, were also arrested. Three (3) females were arrested of which one female who is regarded as the mastermind were arrested close to the Cape Town international airport. The other two (2) females were arrested in Khayelitsha. Three (3) males were arrested in Philippi.

Whilst these arrests were taking place, the joint task team in KwaZulu-Natal conducted a search and seizure operation in Scottsburgh where fraudulent IDs were manufactured (also called a “boiler room”).

The items found at the sites of arrests were laptops, scanners, copying machines, ID’s, copies of ID’s, ID templates, CPS enrolment machines, printers, electronic storage devices, bank cards and SASSA cards.

(Issued on behalf of the HAWKS, SASSA and SAPS Crime Intelligence)