Welcome to this website about the scandal of benefit fraud.

Benefit fraud is rife in the UK. The government pretends it costs us £1.1bn annually. But the real figure is around £3.5bn a year.

The latest figures show there were 5.80m working age benefit claimants at February 2009 - this is 15.7% of the working age population!

The number of working age claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and incapacity benefits totalled 2.60m. 736,000 people were claiming lone parent benefit.

In the year to February there were 422,000 new claims to working age incapacity benefits, and 549,000 new claims for Income Support.

These huge numbers cannot be policed effectively for fraudulent claims. They only emphasise the case for deterrent punishments for those few who do get caught. Indeed, the DWP's boast is that they have over 3,000 fraud investigators. How could they hope to police millions of claims? They can't, of course.

We tell you how to report a case of suspected benefit theft.

But the legal process is cumbersome. And too often light sentences do not reflect the crime, and offer no deterrent. You can see recent cases on the benefit fraud blog, which has to be updated most days.