(HorizonPost.com) – Canadian police charged three Ontario women with fraud after they obtained benefits of more than $5,000 by falsely claiming to be indigenous, the New York Post reported.
The Iqaluit Royal Canadian Mounted Police charged Karima Manji and her adopted adult twin daughters with two counts of fraud each for enrolling in the Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporation (NTI) beneficiary list following an internal investigation by NTI earlier this year.
According to the RCMP, in 2016, Manji, 59, and her two 25-year-old daughters Nadya and Amira Gill applied for and obtained Inuit beneficiary status through the NTI as adopted Inuit children.
Once they obtained the status, the family defrauded two local organizations obtaining grants and scholarships that are exclusively for Inuit beneficiaries.
Amira Gill was awarded a $4,000 scholarship for a utility company in Ontario. A year later, Amira received an award for indigenous students from one of Canada’s largest banks.
The Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporation began its investigation into the potential fraud on March 30. In a statement, NTI said that this is its first case of fraud.
After its investigation, NTI removed the three women from its list of beneficiaries and reported the fraud to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Manji allegedly passed off Amira and Nadya as the twin daughters of an Inuk woman named Kitty Noah. However, Noah’s son said the two sisters are not related to his mother.
Aluki Kotierk, the president of NTI told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that at the least, the three women should pay back the money they fraudulently received.
Kotierk described the fraud as “just another form of colonization.”
Manji and her daughters are scheduled to appear in Iqaluit court at the end of October.
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