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Sweden's employment agency has been tracking the online locations of thousands of citizens claiming unemployment benefits in an effort to crack down on welfare fraud
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- Title
- Sweden is tracking job-seekers online to crack down on public benefits fraud
- Published
- Sep 12 2025
- Word count
- 591 words
No, IP cannot be used to identify the device's physical location. With the press of a button I can make my IP from Germany or Sweden or Russia or pretty much wherever I want. This is absurd.
A more accurate summary of the article would be "Sweden cracking down on unemployment benefits for people trying to watch specific anime on Netflix"
This is half true, but VPNs have generally identifiable IP addresses. Even residential proxy providers like Brightdata/HolaVPN are detectable by competent parties, and they have certain characteristics that would make them stand out versus the typical profile of a traveller.
I would have to see their implementation before having a strong opinion either way about how reliable it is.
That tells you that they are on a VPN but you cannot glean where they are. You cannot use IP to know if they are in the country.
You’re looking at it backwards. If you can determine they aren’t on a VPN, then you can then rely on the geolocation data.
Geolocation by IP isn't reliable at all using off the shelf solutions, as I know all too well from clients asking me to implement it on their applications.
If the agency spent a serious amount of time/effort/ money they might be able to get reliable results, but you can be sure the reason they reached for this approach is somebody sold it as the cheap and quick solution.
And if tracking IPv4, the use of cgNAT means they're also not necessarily unique to each device.
This seems really stupid, for all the reasons the article has already outlined.
They're the govt. Cross reference with passport / border controls, done.
Believe it or not but there is no electronic records for border crossings in the Schengen region currently. The entry and exit stamps on passports is actually the main record.
It is being changed in 2026, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entry/Exit_System
Well, if it doesn’t get delayed again. Until then, Sweden has no records to check with!
edit: another wrinkle is Schengen itself. There’s no record of border crossings between Schengen’s countries and never will be. There’s a lot of Schengen countries with much lower CoL than Sweden.
?????? O..O ??????
"We need to find out if employment insurance recipients are leaving the country"
"Okay, we need a small database of one table with only three columns: passport ID, Social Insurance Number, isRecipient."
I know it's more complex than that, but seriously how is that more complex than having to fight 4000+ legal appeals when every single one of them is going to say "I was using a VPN"?
How would that tell you if the person left or not?
I’m not saying the IP check is a good way to do it but there is no easy way to check it either.
Well I'm not designing a whole database here :)
but I would imagine something like this. Use a machine to scan outgoing passports at the airport. Put that list of numbers into this here dinky table and pull out records that are recipients. It can be a csv even. Or just a long list of numbers. Send list of recipients who left to social insurance dept. Thats it.
It takes time to implement, sure, but I'm positive it is much faster than doing this IP thing which will definitely get challenged. I honestly cannot see why it's so difficult. My provincial govt routinely checks if someone got an unpaid ticket when they renew their license. And if they're not gathering data on who's leaving and coming, they should implement it regardless of side uses like this.
I mean, you're talking about adding a completely new system to an entire country's border systems. That's not exactly easy or cheap. Not only is that a lot of machines, but also a lot of training for border agents.
Additionally, Schengen really throws it into a loop. For one, a Swedish citizen can go to, say, Romania or Bulgaria (much lower CoL) without EVER having to cross a border where their ID is checked. No passport scans are even possible here.
And, they can hop on a train to Norway or Denmark and then fly to non-Schengen country. No Swedish border checks needed to get anywhere in the world. You're not going to be able to convince them (e.g, other countries) to bother adding a bunch of work to their border controls for your own unemployment fraud problem.
Hmmmm I've given it some more thought and hmmmm I guess while using IP by itself isn't a good solution, they can use that as part of a solution, to generate leads so agents can look into other incriminating evidence such as social media for example or straight up ask them. Good old PI work won't turn into international problems
Really? I’m kind of opposed in principle to the government monitoring my activities and travel. Even if they pinky swear to only use it for things that I personally agree with.
That so interesting to me that you feel that way, when I have totally the opposite mindset, of, knowing who's in and out of the border of a country is one of the most reasonable things it can track.
I feel like I have a right to privacy that includes my location, and a right to leave at any time from any point of departure. If I can only leave the country through approved portals and by filling out specific paperwork, that seems like a huge restriction on my right to free movement.
For sure, I definitely feel that way about privacy of movements within my country, so I understand where you're coming from. And too often, governments that can't be trusted will use any data available to do horrible things: while most citizens during the 2019 protests in HK who arrested then were out on bail could escape unstopped at the airport, sadly not all of them. Some, like Joshua Wong, were arrested at the airport and he's still retained to this day. I'm also aware that withholding passports is a common method of human trafficking control, and that during COVID, some Chinese citizenry were not be able to scan their apps to leave their community blocks or board their trains/flights, on the far side of not having movement privacy/rights respected.
So I guess your views on this is that even trustworthy governments could suddenly become destabilized, or they could still use this as a method to target certain dissenting citizenry / vulnerable populations?
I don't really believe in a trustyworthy government for one thing. Once a government has data on a person, it will eventually be weaponized. For example, look at what's now happening in the USA with the government with voter registration data, medicaid records, and IRS filings to effect ICE raids. And, that's with a currently still nominally democratic and free society -- how long will that still be the case?
The other thing is I don't really believe in data security. Just because it starts out in the hands of the government doesn't mean other actors won't gain access. Not to beat a dead horse, but again, look at what has been happening with DOGE in the US where random children are being granted unlimited access to exfiltrate supposedly private data. That's to say nothing about the endless vulnerabilities being exploited by foreign governments and random hackers. The only way to prevent personal data from being stolen is to not record it in the first place.
I always wonder if programs set up to avoid fraud end up costing more than the fraud ever did. I have a feeling they usually do cost more in people hours, software, and offices set up just for that.
A large, and justified, part of that problem is that often the same metrics that would make detecting fraud easier are very very concerning metrics to track in the wrong hands, so the project to track fraud explodes in complexity because the data needed isn't really tracked.
Even then though, yeah, generally systemic abuse makes up a very small % of total expenditure. I do wonder if that's changed somewhat with social media allowing a single loophole to go viral and blow up, but it seems that's pretty easy to identify and react to rather than try and track every instance of wrongdoing.
I think that even if the gross amount of fraud may be small, it produces bad optics and erodes public trust in The System. There's a special kind of indignity in paying some of the highest taxes in the world while feeling cheated somehow. It's important for public services to maintain the image of trustworthiness.
I'd further point out that it's the likelyhood of getting caught that keeps many people honest. Enforcement is expensive, and if the job is done well, over a long period of time, they'll catch almost nobody - because everyone knows they'll get caught.
So to keep the state handing out benefits above reproach by the taxpaying population, there needs to be enforcement - even if, several years in, when they slow down catching people, it looks like a high cost for no results
I'd view it as the same as "Nobody speeds because they'd get caught", with a number of timed average-speed cameras seeming useless (because they never catch speeders anymore)
What a strange way to do enforcement. I don’t know anything about Sweden’s laws, but shouldn’t the banks that receive the deposited funds (either via paper check or direct deposit) be able to say where their customers live? KYC and all that. Place of residence is pretty important in many countries, even just for tax reasons.
Fairly sure they mean the people still have home addresses in Sweden but are going on holidays outside of the country.
I wonder if they've cleared this with EU law. Norway had a big scandal relating to basically the same issue. The EU has something called the "principle of exportability" which means welfare benefits can generally be retained even when living in a different member state. I'm not a lawyer, but the Norway case is strikingly similar to a layman and many lawyers were involved in getting that one wrong.
Norway isn't a member of the EU but is heavily integrated into it through EFTA/the EEA, and I believe the specific laws they ran afoul of here were general EU laws, not specific to the EFTA-EU relationship.