A disabled activist, writer, and vlogger has been targeted by false benefit fraud reports.
An Instagram post by Rach (wheeliemsadvocate) detailed how she had been threatened with false benefit fraud allegations – clearly in an attempt to silence her:
In a video, she said:
Anyone can make a report, even anonymously, and when it’s done maliciously, it doesn’t just cause stress and harm to the person targeted, it also wastes the DWP’s time and the taxpayers’ money.
We need to protect people from this kind of harassment.
She has started a petition to make maliciously false benefit fraud reporting a criminal offence.
Rach has been targeted clearly because she is a prominent voice in the disabled community. It is at best horrible – and at worst, highly sinister. However, this issue is far broader than just that.
Practically non-existent benefit fraud
For years, the DWP has been relentlessly focusing on ‘benefit fraud’, despite fraud rates hovering at very low levels and whilst ignoring massive financial leaks in other places, such as corporate tax evasion.
As Civil Service World previously reported, DWP annual accounts show the fraud-and-error rate dropped to 3.3% in 2024-25, down from 3.6% the previous year. It noted that:
According the annual report and accounts, DWP paid out £290.8bn in benefits and the state pension in the year to 31 March 2025.
Of that figure, a total of £9.3bn related to overpaid benefits and £200m was overpaid state pension. In 2023-24, the figure for overpaid benefits was £9.7bn.
Universal Credit accounted for two-thirds of all benefits overpayments in 2024-25, according to the Office for National Statistics. However, the overpayment rate for Universal Credit dropped to 9.7% in 2024-25, down from 12.4% the previous year.
Of course, this is not the whole story at all. As the Canary has consistently pointed out, benefit fraud is essentially non-existent.
As the Canary’s Steve Topple has previously reported, many of the DWP’s fraud estimates are not from actual claimants at all. Instead, he has detailed how much of the billions the DWP promotes as fraud (and that the media dutifully laps up) is just based on assumptions and guesswork.
The DWP’s own method organises fraud into various categories. It states that:
Any Fraud that is Causal Link (Low Suspicion) has been re-categorised to a new category of “Failure to provide evidence/fully engage in the process”. Cases with an error in this new category have forgone their full benefit entitlement rather than engage in the benefit review process. We therefore make the assumption that the claim was fraudulent, even though the reason for their non-engagement is not clear.
So, the DWP assumes this category is fraud – without any evidence to back it up.
The government’s data found that PIP fraud cases were just 0.1%. But obviously, that doesn’t fit the ‘disabled people wasting taxpayer money’ narrative.
Spying on benefits claimants
Only last week, the Canary’s Hannah Sharland revealed how the DWP are already spying on disabled benefit claimants. She exposed disturbing new details about ‘Covert Surveillance Officers’, which the DWP are currently hiring. And of course, they are targeting chronically ill and disabled people.
This plays into their false narrative even more – pushing unnecessary and expensive resources into solving a problem that doesn’t even exist.
As usual, the right-wing corporate media is as much to blame as the government and DWP. Their continuous scapegoating narrative encourages everyone to suspect their neighbours, friends, and family. This means that people are making completely groundless judgements about people’s disabilities and health conditions, whilst being completely unaware of that person’s lived reality.
Only this week, the Canary has heard (from friends and family members, no less):
“People do abuse the system” (when asked who) “Like our neighbours” (she’s disabled)
“I saw an old person lift their zimmer frame above their heads and then walk holding it to get around a car” (yes, like it’s a mobility AID)
“Cousin xxx can leave the house so she can go to work”
Snitches
And this is the point. The right-wing media has embedded its disgusting narrative so pervasively that many people really believe that benefit fraud is a huge problem.
Never mind that they have no idea what their friend, family member, colleague, or neighbour lives through on a daily basis – “look, they’re out of the house”, “they look fine”, so they must be defrauding the system and stealing taxpayer funds.
It’s the Motability manufactured outrage paradigm through and through. Disabled people getting nice cars and nice things on disability benefits – when in reality, most can barely afford their basic costs of living, let alone even the aids, medication, and care they need – and which all cost them more to boot.
The DWP and the government want people to stay suspicious because it pays them to. It gives them the pretext to make huge cuts to welfare. All while their corporate capitalist mates continue to screw the system and squeeze the public for all their worth.
Meanwhile, the department actively encourages friends, families and neighbours to snitch on benefits claimants. And now, well-respected disabled activists like Rach are being caught in the crossfire.
Feature image via screengrab
