Parents who went from Liverpool to Amsterdam with their autistic children are among thousands who have had their child benefit wrongly stopped as part of a crackdown on benefit fraud, it has emerged.

The error by HM Revenue and Customs emerged 48 hours after the Guardian and the Detail reported on hundreds of families in Northern Ireland who had child benefit stopped after they returned home from holiday via Dublin airport, leaving HMRC with the impression they had taken a one-way ticket out of the country and were fraudulently collecting child benefit.

It has now come to light that HMRC sent out letters questioning the residency of almost 35,000 of the 6.9m in receipt of child benefit across the UK.

Also among those whose benefits were frozen are a woman who went to France for five days after her husband died there; a Lithuanian man, living and paying taxes in England for 24 years, who was “caught” after he went on a five-day holiday with his son to Italy via Stansted airport; a family from Hove who flew in and out of Gatwick on a trip to Australia; and a woman who flew to Bristol from Belfast for her grandmother’s funeral but returned via Dublin airport.

HMRC apologised to the families and admitted it had sent letters to 0.5% of the 6.9m claimants with “payments suspended” while inquiries continued. It said it expected “the majority had been suspended correctly”.

It also said it was “urgently reviewing the current process and actively considering options.”

But the parents who have had their child benefits stopped are furious.

“It does feel like you are being punished for going away,” said Cerys, a music teacher. She took her three children on a one-day trip to Amsterdam from John Lennon airport in Liverpool, with the sole purpose of familiarising two of them, who have been diagnosed with autism, with flying. They left at 6am and returned that night to make sure they would make bedtime at home, to minimise anxiety.

“Child benefit are now saying that there is no evidence of me returning with my family so I need to produce a ridiculous amount of evidence to prove that I have not been living in Amsterdam since February. We flew out of and back into Liverpool airport the same day,” she said.

“This is the one time in God knows how many years we have gone abroad. My son is eight now and this was the first time he was abroad, but we lost child benefit because of it,” said Cerys.

She said she initially thought the HMRC letter was a scam and now faces demands to provide original bank statements, letters from old and new schools and GP records to prove she is not a fraudster.

What frustrates her further is that the government has universal credit records that show she is in the UK and has recently moved from Liverpool to Newcastle. But this was not cross-checked.

The £60 a week she receives for the three children may not seem a lot, she says, but as she is freelance it is a vital part of her household budget.

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Simon Pilbrow in Northern Ireland took a short break with his boys via Heathrow airport to Vienna in 2023. On Friday he received a letter saying that HMRC was stopping his benefits.

He said: “I called up [HMRC]. I’m normally a pretty chilled person, but I was absolutely raging at having to prove that I live in my own country. Bit of a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. They said I can’t do anything. I said I work at Tesco, which is the kind of job that you can’t really do working from Austria.”

Simon Pilbrow and his two sons. Photograph: Simon Pilbrow/Copyright: Simon Pilbrow

Mark Blackmore, a theatre and event technician whose benefit was stopped after a holiday to Spain three years ago, has sent HMRC an invoice marked “for wasting my time” after he spent three hours putting documents together to prove he was still in the UK. “They have certainly got my home address, which is where they sent this letter. And it isn’t in Spain,” he said.

Matt and Judy, grandparents in Durham and the legal guardians of two autistic boys, have also been caught out. They travelled to France at Easter last year, with Matt driving via Newhaven and Dieppe and Judy following on a flight to Newcastle but returning with the rest of the family by car. An American with indefinite leave to remain, she had her passport stamped in France on the way in and the way out, proof that the trip was a holiday.

Their benefits were stopped on 6 October and they fear it could be just a starting point to cut off any other benefits they might be getting for the two boys, aged 11 and 14.

“I can see how somebody’s come up with a good idea: ‘Why don’t we check everyone who’s left the country on a one-way ticket?’ But they haven’t checked whether they come back in or not,” the couple said. “This is clearly a fishing expedition based on a half-baked idea. Simple checks would show we always are here unless on holiday.”

HMRC said: “While this affects a very small number of child benefit claimants, we are very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly. They should respond to us as soon as possible so we can check their case, reinstate payments, and ensure no one is left out of pocket.

“We’ve already taken swift action to amend our approach, including checking employment data first before suspending payments.”

The UK government launched the crackdown in August, claiming it could save £350m in benefit fraud. The Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould said: “From September we’ll have 10 times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money.”

Child benefit can be stopped “if a claimant is outside the UK for more than eight weeks”, the government said.

The international travel data used by HMRC says “shows that customers have left the UK and may have not returned” without acknowledging that border data was incomplete or incorrect for many.

Some names have been changed to protect identities.