Access in Carinthia

Tax money scammed: fraudster (59) exposed

Austrian controls at the border with Slovenia (symbolic image).

(Bild: Uta Rojsek-Wiedergut)

Brazen: Not "only" that he has been scamming money for years as a supposedly Austrian pensioner, a man also earns a good amount of pocket money illegally as a bus driver. Now the handcuffs have clicked for the fraudster.

The investigations in this particular case obviously took some time - but now the lengthy results of the raid a year ago at the Caravan Tunnel border crossing have come to light: as reported, a suspicious driver of a minibus was closely scrutinized during the checks.

And apparently quite rightly so: as it turned out, the 59-year-old driver and his passengers were traveling without valid authorization. But that was not all. The red-white-red authorities took an even closer look in the course of the apprehension. 

752 illegal border crossings
In the course of the investigation, the Bosnian had not only been illegally collecting pension insurance money from Austria for years - he had also cheated the Austrian tax authorities out of huge sums of money. Since the beginning of 2019, at least 752 border crossings as a driver of buses can be proven - without these ever having been reported.

As things stand at present, this is likely to have caused the Austrian state a total loss of several hundred thousand euros. The 59-year-old was reported at large.