There will always be unscrupulous people out for an illicit or ill gotten ‘earner’. The con artist and the ‘mark’ are always with us in some form or another. But, the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy seems to have been a particularly fertile ground for fraudsters. So far there have been twenty people either charged or convicted of Grenfell related fraud. As of August 2018, there had been, according to the Daily Mail, 14 charged with 11 convicted or admitting various fraud charges against them.
It seems that the world and his wife have dipped or attempted to dip their grubby snouts into the trough of funds donated by the public and splurged by the government on the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. Several of those who have been convicted of fraud were illegal immigrants. They may have latched onto the Grenfell scam not only because of the cash to be had but also because the government, foolishly in my view, issued an amnesty for illegals who were resident in the Grenfell block at the time of the fire. The police seem to have done a good job of tracking down these fraudsters but there may be many more who have got away with their frauds either because they were better at covering their tracks or where the police may not have pushed for prosecution due to much smaller sums of defrauded cash being involved.
The latest Grenfell fraudster to come to light and to my attention is a 37 year old pharmacy technician named Daniel Steventon. This fraudster, at least to my knowledge the 11th to be convicted, claimed to be flatsharing with another person in Grenfell Tower when the fire broke out. He managed to defraud the taxpayer of over £75,000. His false claim led to him being housed in a Chelsea hotel, given a £14,000 food allowance and cash payments of over £6000. These and the hotel costs made up the £75k that Steventon defrauded from the taxpayer. A report in the Metro newspaper said that Steventon pleaded guilty at Isleworth Crown Court to fraud by false representation and he was gaoled for 42 months.
When we look back at the relatively large number of false claims that have been made connected to the Grenfell fire we can reasonably surmise that this may have come about for two main reasons. The first is that the local authority and the government of Theresa May panicked at the horrific fire and its political implications and therefore threw money at any and all ‘Grenfell’ claims without proper checking. In effect the Government engaged in fiscal and political virtue signalling by chucking money and legal get out of gaol free cards to any illegal immigrants claiming to be in Grenfell at the time of the fire. The second thing that has struck me about the whole Grenfell fraud saga is it shows how councils like Kensington and Chelsea have lost control of their properties and have little or no idea who is staying in them or occupying them. This is something that became quite apparent shortly after the fire.
Because of the fact that the Govt, both local and national, threw large amounts of cash, seemingly with little or no accountancy control, or sufficient checking to see if the claims being made were genuine or not, the Grenfell situation became a magnet for fraudsters. The cost to the taxpayer for the Govt’s decision to shove money willy nilly at Grenfell, maybe because the Govt didn’t want to be seen as ‘racist’ in its response to the tragedy, has been immense. It may well be that the amount of lost and wasted money will increase as I don’t for a moment believe that all those who have been defrauding or taking the piss after Grenfell have all be caught or punished. I suspect that there may be a few more cases to add to the Grenfell ‘Swindler’s List’. If there is one big loser in all this fraud and incompetence then it is those who have genuinely been harmed or damaged by the Grenfell fire. The number of frauds is now so obvious to the public that I have noticed what looks like a drop in support for real victims of the Grenfell fire. After all would you donate money to a cause which is so riddled with fraudsters, piss takers and incompetence as the Grenfell appeal? I know I would not. When I donate money to a cause I want it to go to the ground level cause and not whoever has been allowed to syphon off money due to bad management or a government outbreak of virtue signalling.
