Unemployment benefits: Fraudster collects 32,385 euros too much

Created: 08/09/2022, 17:00

By: Josef Ametsbichler

For almost a year, a man had wrongly collected unemployment benefits.

Now he has been convicted (symbol image).

©PantherMedia/Mehaniq

PROCESS Repayment does not protect Plieninger from a suspended sentence

Pliening/Ebersberg – Those who are late are sometimes not punished by life but by the judiciary.

This is what happened to an engineer from Plieningen who had "forgotten" to let the employment agency know for around nine months that he was back in paid employment.

Instead, the 49-year-old received more than 2,500 euros in unemployment benefit I per month in 2020 and 2021 in addition to his salary.

That makes a total of 32,384.94 euros, which he would not have been entitled to – in reality he was only unemployed for three months, not a whole year.

This emerges from the Ebersberg District Court's response to an EZ request.

The man appears to be a notorious latecomer.

Not only did he fail to report to the employment agency, no, when they found out about him, he did not show up for the resulting court case.

The legally envisaged reaction is a penalty order: the court imposed a suspended sentence of eight months on the non-appearance for fraud.

New process, but the accused is missing again

This in turn seemed to startle the Plieninger in the meantime: He lodged an objection, whereupon a new hearing date was scheduled for the court.

Everyone was there: the judge, the public prosecutor, the clerk.

It was missing again: the accused.

After all, that shortened the trial time: after 15 minutes of waiting in silence, judge Vera Hörauf rejected the objection and thus imposed the eight-month suspended sentence from the penalty order on the man who had not previously been convicted.

According to the district court, the man has meanwhile repaid the unemployment benefit he was wrongly collected – the court spokesman does not know by what means.

However, the fact that he paid for the damage he caused to the state did not protect him from the corresponding punishment.

Incidentally, another round in the process would be conceivable: the engineer can appeal against the rejection verdict and let another court wait on the matter – if he is not too late for that again.

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