A man who fabricated the identities of 188 nonexistent children has been ordered to repay over £2 million by the Department for Work and Pensions. Ali Bana Mohamed, 42, has been given just three months to repay the sum to DWP, otherwise he faces 9 years imprisonment.

Mohamed, of Hulme, Manchester, was arrested in January 2022 after admitting to 29 counts of fraud. The Mancunian hatched the scheme with friends and relatives from Birmingham and London, and together they submitted child benefit and tax credit claims under 70 different adult identities between April 2007 and July 2016.

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Despite cheating taxpayers out of at least £1.7 million, their scam operation was foiled after HMRC noticed the same two phone numbers had been calling about what they originally believed to be unrelated claims.

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Their suspicions led them to launch an investigation called Operation Paratrooper, which helped them to catch Mohamed and six others in the act. Mohamed was also said to have kept a papertrail of notebooks filled with details of his fraudulent activities stashed in his wardrobe. His sentence of three-and-a-half years would have been longer if he had not already been serving 16 years for drugs and immigration offences.

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In October 2017 he was tried alongside an accomplice for concealing 2,400kg of Khat, a class C drug, in 2016. A hearing at Liverpool Crown Court ordered Mohamed to repay £2,164,828.30 within three months or face 9 years imprisonment. The six accomplices also received prison sentences adding up to more than thirteen years.

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A representative for DWP said: "Our welfare system is predicated on fairness, and we will make sure that those who need our help receive it and those who wish to exploit the system face justice. ‘So as benefit fraud becomes more sophisticated, so must we. This latest case is testament to the tenacity of our expert anti-fraud squad who saved the hard-working taxpayer £1.1billion last year."