Up to 700 pregnant migrants paid men with German passports to pretend to be their baby’s father in a successful attempt to fool authorities into granting their child citizenship, prosecutors say.
Once their babies were born the women received temporary residency to remain with the child and this would eventually enable them to get full citizenship.
The racket was uncovered after the authorities noticed men were registering as the father of at least ten children by different women. Under German law a man does not have to prove paternity to act as the legal father.
Prosecutors believe the men charged about €5,000 in each case and many were part of an organised criminal network. Later some women were forced into prostitution to pay their debts or maintain the appearance of the fake relationship to stay in the country.
The scam involved women from Africa, eastern Europe and Vietnam, the broadcaster RBB revealed. It said that the pregnant women generally came to Germany on a tourist visa. Their babies automatically received citizenship if their father was a German passport holder. The mothers qualified after eight years of legal residency.
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The men would not face any financial demands for the child because mother and baby lived on benefits, RBB said.
“We have found some men who claimed paternity ten times,” Martin Steltner, from the prosecutor’s office, said. More cases were being found every month and there could be up to 700 in the capital, he added.
Ole Schröder, a parliamentary secretary from the Christian Democratic Union, said: “This is serious organised crime.”
RBB said that a 28-year-old man who claimed to be the father of a Vietnamese woman’s child was a sympathiser of the far-right National Democratic Party, which opposes immigration.
The authorities were said to have been unwilling to act after a court ruling in 2013 that paternity could not be contested even in cases of suspicion because it could lead to the child becoming stateless. Prosecutors have since been given more power to act.