'Your mum's 104?': man caught in pension scam

A man in Rome was caught claiming his dead mother's pension after post office workers became suspicious that her apparent longevity was too good to be true.

The 68-year-old pensioner has been cashing his mother’s pension, now worth €700 a month, at the Rome post office for the past 14 years. But the post office manager became suspicious on realizing that if still alive his mother would have reached the remarkable age of 104, Roma Today reported. After tipping off the police, authorities discovered that she had, in fact, died in 2000.

They launched a sting operation at the post office, where the pensioner was stopped by police on Saturday as he picked up the monthly cash installment. Since his mother died he has illegally claimed more than €100,000, Rome Today said.

The news comes less than two months after police in southern Italy discovered a 51-year-old man had hidden his mother’s dead body in a freezer in order to continue to pick up her pension. The case was just the latest in a string of similar incidents in which family members have concealed their elderly relatives’ bodies in order to claim their state benefits.

It's not the first time that a this kind of event happens in Italy; last february An Italian man from Reggio Calabria in southern Italy kept the body of his dead mother in a freezer for more than a year so that he could carry on collecting her pension.

The 51-year-old was arrested for fraud and hiding a corpse after the gruesome discovery was made, the website Giornale Ibleo reported. Maria Musitano, 94, is said to have died of natural causes more than a year ago. She had shared the home in the town of Delianuova with her son, Igino, who confessed to drawing her monthly pension of about €1,000.

Police were alerted after neighbours in the town of 4,000 grew suspicious about her whereabouts and noticed a stench coming from the home. Each time they inquired after his mother, Igino is said to have “diverted the conversation and made excuses to get away”, the website reported. Cases of bodies of dead pensioners being kept so that crisis-hit relatives can continue collecting their benefits are becoming fairly frequent in Italy.

In late January, the body of Paola Puricelli was found in the freezer of her home in Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region. She had died four years earlier. Her daughter told police she kept the body so that she could “always be close” to her mother but also admitted that having not worked for years and been refused bank loans, she “survived” off her mother’s pension.

In November 2013, instead, another Italian man allegedly hid the body of his 85-year-old father in order to continue claiming his monthly pension.

Forty-year-old Giampiero Di Tullio, a man in the central Lazio region, hid the body of his 85-year-old father in a breach in the wall of his living room, after he died of natural causes in August 2011. Di Tullio decided to hide the body so that he could continue to claim his father’s €1,300 monthly pension, which had supported the two men, Blitz Quotidiano said on Sunday.

The plan worked for nearly two years, until police arrived at Di Tullio’s home in the town of Subiaco to search for drugs. Along with heroin and cocaine, police also found the mummified corpse, the newspaper said.