Elderly NSW woman ordered to pay $514k after claiming dead siblings' pensions for decades

An 82-year-old woman from the NSW Blue Mountains has been ordered to repay more than half a million dollars after claiming pension payments for her two dead siblings for decades — including one who died in WWII.

Pauline Mitchell's deception was uncovered when federal police raided her home in 2010 and found bank cards and bank accounts for her dead sister Mary, who died in 1983, and brother Kenneth, who died at sea in 1942 during WWII, News Corp reports.

But Ms Mitchell refused to admit her fraud and went to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Despite documents proving her siblings' deaths, Ms Mitchell insisted she had seen her siblings alive in a park and collected the money for them from ATMs.

She said she would leave the money on a table in a shed and her brother and sister would come and collect it when she was not there.

Ms Mitchell also insisted she was poor and at times homeless.

But the tribunal discovered she had owned four homes since the late 1970s and ordered that she also pay back some of her own widow and age pensions, which are meant to factor in property assets.

She now owes $514,000.