A former Department of Home Affairs employee has been sentenced to an effective five years’ imprisonment for fraud after unlawfully manipulating the National Population Register to submit false funeral insurance claims.
Dawn Celeste Pieterson (46) was sentenced on 26 January by the Calvinia Specialised Commercial Crime Court in the Northern Cape. She was convicted on 1 October last year on nine counts of fraud, as well as two counts of contravening the Births and Deaths Registration Act.
According to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI), Pieterson committed the offences between February 2019 and September 2022 while employed at the Department of Home Affairs in Calvinia in the Northern Cape. In the course of her duties, she had access to the National Population Register.
During this period, Pieterson took out funeral policies with several insurers and nominated herself as the beneficiary. To trigger payouts, she unlawfully captured false death notifications on the system by issuing fraudulent BI-1663 forms, causing living individuals to be recorded as dead.
The false registrations had significant consequences for the affected individuals, who encountered administrative and practical difficulties as a result of being incorrectly listed as dead. Four insurance companies suffered a combined loss of R334 634 from the fraudulent funeral claims, the DPCI said.
The Court sentenced Pieterson to five years’ direct imprisonment for the fraud convictions. On the two counts related to contraventions of the Births and Deaths Registration Act, she received a 12-month prison sentence wholly suspended for five years. She was also declared unfit to possess a firearm.
