Six people were charged this week in the federal investigation of fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs.
“Every day we look under a rock and find a new $50 million fraud scheme,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
“The magnitude of the fraud in Minnesota cannot be overstated. Staggering amounts of money have been lost,” he said.
Fourteen programs have been under scrutiny, many involving the Somali immigrant community in the state.
The amount of fraud that has taken place is “the $18-billion question,” Thompson said. “The answer is far too much.”
Thompson said that since 2018, he estimated “half or more” of the $18 billion was paid out due to fraud, according to KTSP-TV.
Thompson announced indictments against what he called “fraud tourists.”
Anthony Waddell Jefferson, 37, and Lester Brown, 53, both of Philadelphia, were charged with raking in $3.5 million from the housing program through the use of fake companies.
Three other people were charged with fraud linked to the housing program.
One of them, Kaamil Omar Sallah, 26, is charged with four counts of wire fraud.
According to state records, his company, SafeLodgings, Inc., allegedly inflated its billing hours and filed claims for services that were not provided.
SafeLodgings, Inc., claimed workers provided housing services to multiple people in the same time frame.
Sallah allegedly billed Medicaid for 3,600 hours in 2024, which would amount to about 10 hours of work every day of the year.
🚨 HOLY SMOKES: The Assistant U.S. Attorney investigating the Somali fraud in Minnesota says as much as $18 billion could have been stolen from the taxpayers.
He compares it to an iceberg– “much larger than visible to the public.”
All of this happened on Tim Walz’s watch. pic.twitter.com/oqE0xRGXBl
— CJ Pearson (@Cjpearson) December 18, 2025
SafeLodgings received $1.3 million from March 2023 through August 2025.
Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, 27, was charged with fraud in connection with the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program.
Yussuf allegedly recruited families from the Somali community to enroll in Star Autism Center, paid kickbacks to the families whose children were falsely listed as autistic, and raked in more than $6 million.
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