The Irish Times has learned a large volume of people during the summer received emails purporting to be from the Irish Court Service effectively calling them to perform jury duty. However, the emails were from a fraud gang passing itself as the Irish Court Service in the emails. The criminal investigation has also discovered that all of the emails sent to the 73 people whose identities were used to claim the PUP came from the same email address. All of the applications made for the PUP payments also came from the same address, yet the fraud was not spotted by the Department of Social protection. Even after gardaí alerted the department to the fraud, some of the payments continued and even some arrears were paid.

Source: The Irish Times December 08, 2020 15:00 UTC