NEW DELHI — Half a million rupees is a lot of money in the north Indian farming villages that skirt the border with Nepal, and one of the few ways to get it is to be killed by a tiger.

Forest officials, on the lookout for fraud, have turned away four of seven families who have come forward in the last four months to collect the government compensation package — worth about $7,700 — saying they had falsified the details of their relatives’ deaths.

Specifically, they were said to have falsified the place of death: Compensation is granted only if the person is killed outside a tiger reserve, and several families have surreptitiously moved the bodies of relatives from inside the reserve where they were killed to agricultural lands, said V. K. Singh, forest conservator of the Bareilly zone in Uttar Pradesh.

One victim was Nanki Devi, 55. Ms. Devi’s family said she was attacked in a sugar cane field. But forest officials investigating the case discovered the marks of tractor tires that led from the field to a spot in the reserve, where they found broken bangles and bits of cloth.