Same as in the United States.
Via DW:
Regional German broadcaster NDR reported on Sunday that the majority of more than 300 cases of welfare fraud in the nothern city of Braunscheig are related to Sudanese refugees. The total fraud in the state of Lower Saxony is estimated to have cost taxpayers 3 to 5 million euros ($3.2-5.3 million).
The suspects are believed to have been among the 800,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Germany in 2015, the chairman of the commission, Joern Memenga, said.
According to the initial report, the refugees in question had registered themselves several times in different locations in a bid to receive multiple welfare payments.
Most of them succeeded by using basic disguises to create three or four different identities.
“Sometimes just growing a beard, or putting on a pair of glasses, having shorter hair, but always different surnames,” Memenga said.
Overstretched’
Due to the huge influx of asylum seekers, last summer, Memenga claimed that overworked civil servants had not been able to see through the deception.
“They simply registered themselves several times,” Memenga said. “To some extent with the same members of staff. But at the time they were all overstretched.”
At the height of the refugee crisis, they were registering 2,000 people a day.
“At that point, we wanted to avoid one thing – homelessness,” Memenga explained. In many early cases, refugees registered with no papers, with only a photograph and no fingerprints being assigned to their registration documents.