Talk about taking food from the mouths of babes!
The most vile example of that is the massive “Feeding Our Future” scams perpetrated by fraudsters in Minnesota some years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At that time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture introduced a “Feeding Our Future” effort as part the Federal Child Nutrition Program. The effort was meant to provide meals to hungry children during a period of shutdowns, unemployment and food insecurity. Minnesota received $250 million in federal funds for that purpose, and most of those funds were ripped off by fraudsters.
Instead of feeding children, dozens of blatant schemers in Minnesota stole that money through fraud schemes to treat themselves to new cars, homes and other luxury goodies. They didn’t feed children. Oh no! They fed their own greed.
The dozens of crooks had existent organizations – or they made up new ones – to help the hungry. Then they would submit phony lists of meal counts to claim they fed either far more kids than they did or they would fabricate thousands of names of children obtained from school lists. Then, of course, the federal money would roll in to the fraudsters for their spending sprees.
In recent years, 70 Minnesotans have been charged with the ruthless scam. Sad to say, most of them are Somali-Americans.
The latest one convicted is Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, 34, of Bloomington, who was sentenced to 210 months in prison. As the head of the “Afrique Hospitality Group,” he acquired through fraud a staggering $47 million in pandemic funds intended to feed children. At his sentencing, Shariff acknowledged his scheme had “tarnished the image of the Somali-American community.” One has to wonder if his remorse for that tarnishing is, in fact, sincere.
Another fraudster is Ayan Farah Abukar, 38, of Savage, who pled guilty to placing her organization, the non-profit Action for East African People, into the federal nutrition program, then lying about giving meals to 5,000 children each day at various lunch sites. She took in $5.7 million because of those lies.
Most of such fraudsters did their dirty deeds in the Twin Cities area.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his administration has long been under attack for not being cognizant of that massive “Feeding Our Future” fraud when it was happening.
Recently, Walz signed an executive order that will transfer the state’s Department of Fraud investigators to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, creating a new organization dubbed the Fraud and Financial Crimes Unit.
According to a press release, the plan expands protections and punishments in all kinds of fraud cases. It “calls for a wide-ranging effort to beef up the state’s anti-fraud efforts, including adding more staff to the attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud unit and using artificial intelligence to analyze data to help detect and flag payment anomalies for Medicaid providers.”
Walz said this:
“As long as there have been programs aimed at helping people, there have been fraudulent actors looking to steal from those who need them most. Our job is to stay one step ahead of them. We’re coupling new tools, like AI, with old fashioned police work, to slam the door shut on theft.”
Let us hope these promises of fraud investigations, protections, arrests and punishment succeed.
It’s pitiful to think of how many children may have been crying from hunger as those “Feed the Future” felons fed their bulging bank accounts.
