Employment law is a nice little earner for serial litigants like Mr X, who has brought 91 cases to the employment tribunal since 1996. He and others like him blackmail employers. They cheat taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of pounds and clog up the courts. And nobody in authority, it would seem, is interested in stopping them.Mr X’s 91 claims range from unfair dismissal and detriment through disability, to transfer of undertakings and breach of contract. Most claims have been settled, others have succeeded and a few have been withdrawn. He is still filing claims and still is not on record anywhere as a vexatious or serial litigant.

The net is closing in on Mr Y, however, a serial litigant who a year ago admitted to Gordon Turner, founder of London firm Partners Employment Lawyers, that he had filed ‘about 50 claims’ for age discrimination at tribunals throughout the country – and presumably has filed plenty more since.

Mr Y, who is of mature years, looks for online recruitment advertisements that contain ill-considered phrases like ‘young graduate’ or ‘recently qualified’ and submits a job application. Shortly afterwards, he follows up with an email alleging age discrimination – and offering to settle for a few thousand quid.

He never attends a hearing, but simply fails to turn up on the day. The employer, meanwhile, has taken time off from work and instructed a lawyer. Court time has been booked and other hearings have been delayed. The employer and taxpayers are left out of pocket, but it has only cost Mr Y the time it takes to send a few emails.

He told Turner that he was earning a good income from the scam ‘because many employers prefer to settle rather than spend time and money defending the claim’. That boast may have been a mistake, for a national newspaper subsequently tracked Mr Y down and published his photograph. No other action has been taken, but let us hope the publicity has cramped his style.

Ms Z’s style has most definitely been cramped. As a 51-year-old experienced accountant, she applied for 20 or more positions advertised by recruitment agencies for recently qualified accountants. After not receiving any job interviews, she began age discrimination proceedings against the agencies.

Some agencies settled immediately, but the rest chose to appear before the employment tribunal – and unlike Mr Y, Ms Z elected to attend the hearing, too. The tribunal dismissed her claims on the grounds she had no genuine interest in the vacancies for which she had applied and awarded costs against her of up to £10,000 for each agency. The Employment Appeal Tribunal, to which she appealed, upheld the tribunal’s ruling.

Such serial litigants are not stopped earlier because there is no online record that you can search to identify them. You must go in person to the employment tribunal’s office in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, where the records are kept. It is a long trek if you happen to practise in Cornwall or Cumbria. It is a fair distance from Yorkshire, too - a Sheffield law firm recently sent a trainee to do the search and he was gone all day. It is an unwieldy and outdated system that has the effect of shielding the scammers from scrutiny. Turner has recently set up a service that will search the records for a fee.

There has still been no serious attempt by government to stamp out the scam, although Turner has recently written to the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, to explain the problem and ask him to act. The sooner he does so, the sooner these scammers will stop making a mockery of the tribunal service – and the sooner employers and taxpayers will stop having to line their pockets.