Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to her letter of 20 July 2020 to the Work and Pensions Committee, how many cases of universal credit identity hijack her Department (a) has investigated since October 2018 and (b) is currently investigating.

In terms of UC Advances cases where an individual’s identity has been hijacked, we have investigated a significant number of potential or alleged UC Advances frauds and to date have found 36 cases where the person had been a genuine victim of hijacked id. Other cases are still in the process of being investigated. We cannot provide details of any potential identity frauds as the outcomes (of each case) cannot be pre-determined.

In addition, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Cyber Resilience Centre within the Department for Work and Pensions thwarted attempts made to defraud the Government of an estimated £1.7bn through organised criminal attacks on the Universal Credit system.

The Department was able to intervene on around 133,000 linked fraudulent claims and prevent the vast majority from being paid. Some claims received an advance or progressed to payment, but were subsequently detected and payments stopped immediately, with less than £50 million paid out in total.

These claims used hijacked identities, but the identities were not stolen from the Department. Of the attempted fraudulent claims only a very small minority used the identities of existing benefit claimants. Where existing claims have been affected, the Department has reinstated the original claim.

All figures used in this response are correct as of 20 November 2020.