NEW YORK: Seventeen people have been accused of making false financial claims worth USD 42.5 million using false documents from Holocaust survivor funds over several years.
Applications contained fabricated personal details like fake birth dates and fictitious stories of suffering at the hand of the Nazis.
Six of the alleged con artists worked for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, according to 'Daily News'.
"If ever there was a cause that you would hope and expect would be immune from base greed and criminal fraud, it would be the Claims Conference, which every day assists thousands of poor and elderly victims of Nazi persecution", said Manhattan US, Attorney Preet Bharara.
In some cases, the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Funding comes from the German government and more than 600,000 claims have been processed worldwide, according to the local newspaper, which reported that many of the false applications came from the Russian community in the Brooklyn borough.
The Claims Conference contacted the FBI in December 2009 when it suspected the funds were being stolen. "It's disgusting that anyone would steal under these conditions," said the Claims Conference VP Greg Schneider.
"Without the extraordinary cooperation of the Claims Conference in ferreting out this alleged scheme to defraud them, it never would have been exposed," Bharara was quoted as saying by the 'New York Post'.
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