Israel Police arrest four women in tax-refund scam that hit some 500 victims

Three of the suspects worked at a legitimate tax-refund firm, police say, steering clients’ fees into private accounts and cashing out their pensions

Police arrested four women in northern Israel on Sunday on suspicion of defrauding some 500 people who had sought help claiming tax refunds, in a scheme that allegedly netted hundreds of thousands of shekels.

Northern District police officers and Border Police troops raided the suspects’ homes early Sunday, took the four into custody and seized items linking them to the alleged offenses, police said. The suspects are a mother and her two daughters from Kafr Kanna and a woman from Ilut, both localities near Nazareth.

According to the Northern District’s fraud unit, three of the suspects, the mother, one of her daughters, and the woman from Ilut, worked together at a legitimate tax-refund company.

They approached clients who wanted to check whether they were eligible for a refund and had them pay a fee to open a file into the suspects’ private bank account, then later into a fictitious account the suspects had set up.

Many of the roughly 500 victims never filed a complaint, and investigators contacted them on their own initiative, police said.

In recent months, the suspects also contacted the clients’ pension funds and had them cashed out, police said, costing the victims both money and accrued benefits.

Fraud from the inside

In July, a major corruption investigation led to the arrest and questioning of several current and former Israel Tax Authority employees suspected of accepting bribes over an extended period in exchange for facilitating the submission and approval of fraudulent tax reports and refunds worth an estimated 80 million shekels.

The affair is believed to have continued for more than 20 years at tax assessor offices in the central region, including the Petah Tikva and Netanya branches, with the suspects alleged to have collected between 10 million and 15 million shekels in bribes.