Our paper evidences how discourses concerning social welfare ‘fraud’ are created and disseminated. Using qualitative content analysis, informed by a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, we examine the production of hegemonic anti-welfare discourses used in the Irish Department of Social Protection’s 2017 Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All Campaign (original emphasis). Building on our earlier work (see Devereux and Power, 2019) which focused on media coverage of the 2017 campaign and the emergence of a counter-hegemonic discourse in online and other settings, this paper investigates a Corpus consisting of pre-planning memos; the campaign’s press release; and promotional materials used in the campaign. We pay particular attention to the internal debates within the Department of Social Protection concerning the linguistic and discursive choices to be made in explaining social welfare ‘fraud’ to the general public. Our analysis evidences the ways in which this campaign drew from an anti-welfare imaginary which has a long history. We demonstrate how the campaign rehearsed the familiar ‘disgust’ discourses of ‘welfare fraud’, welfare recipients, poverty and unemployment by the Neo Liberal State. We evidence the spurious nature of the data being used to exaggerate social welfare 'fraud' and we also note the particular political context - Leo Varadkar's bid for the role of leader of Fine Gael - in which this particular campaign occurred.