An unemployed mother of six who ‘brainwashed’ her children into believing they were seriously ill to scam more than £500,000 (€575,000) in benefits has been jailed by a UK court.

The woman, who was jailed for seven-and-a-half years yesterday, convinced a string of top hospitals for ten years that her children were suffering a host of serious conditions.

She persuaded surgeons to remove part of her youngest son’s stomach so feeding tubes could be fitted, while the 49-year-old’s youngest daughter – who was still wearing nappies at 12 as a result of the cruel scam – endured procedures for fake chronic asthma and urinary and stomach problems.

Detectives believe the scam started when one of the mother’s children genuinely fell ill and she realised it opened the door to extra benefits.

Over ten years she ‘exaggerated and falsified’ a huge range of medical complaints, mainly focusing on breathing and eating difficulties, while ‘brainwashing’ her children into believing they were seriously ill.

But away from officials, she took her children to McDonald’s restaurants where they ate normally.

On one occasion her son was marched into a GP surgery dressed head-to-toe in yellow and carrying a yellow balloon. His mother insisted they were symptoms of autism.

She used money from the benefit fraud to furnish her four-bedroom house in Surrey. She lived there with her children and partner, a maintenance engineer, despite claiming to be a single mother. She received £87,424 (€100,000) in disability living allowance between October 2003 and February 2014, and falsely claimed income support. The total claimed was £375,198 (€432,000).

On top of that, police found piles of specialist health service equipment, food and medicines worth more than £145,000 (€167,000). The total cost to the UK taxpayer is likely to be over £1million (€1.15million) because of the vast number of hours, procedures and equipment wasted in the treatment of her healthy children. Judge Elizabeth Smaller, sentencing the woman at Croydon Crown Court in London, said she had robbed her children of an ordinary childhood.

She told the mother: ‘Despite everything, your children still love you, which makes your exploitation of their unconditional love and trust, for them, all the more serious and bewildering.’ Judge Smaller condemned doctors at a string of top UK hospitals for failing to stop the woman as she forced her healthy children to have unnecessary operations as part of the scam. The judge said that while one former GP, Dr Susannah Hart, did raise the alarm with consultants at hospitals where the children were being treated, her intervention in 2010 was ‘rebuffed’.

Senior medics – at hospitals including Great Ormond Street, Royal Brompton, and Chelsea and Westminster – now face investigations into how the ‘obstructive and manipulative’ woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, managed to run rings around the system until her arrest in 2013.

By Mail Foreign Service