Criminal charges have been laid against a Minnesota man accused of a massive food stamp fraud scheme that allegedly siphoned off millions in ill-gotten taxpayer dollars.
Abdidwahid Mohamed, owner of Minnesota Food Grocery LLC, allegedly used EBT cards registered to others to purchase items at Sam’s Club and Costco in 2021 before promptly reselling them in his store, Fox 9 Minneapolis reported.
Fox News notes the scale and proportion of the enterprise:
Authorities in Hennepin County say they observed Mohamed making purchases and followed him back to his store with the goods. Surveillance footage and GPS data backed this up, while investigators noted that many of the EBT cardholders were either out of the country or say they never shopped at the stores he used.
SNAP, the federal program allegedly abused by Mohamed, provides food assistance to low-income households through EBT cards that function like debit cards.
“Mohamed received $1,141,082 in EBT payments,” according to the complaint as reported by the outlet, which added the plan “involved a high degree of sophistication or planning or occurred over a lengthy period of time.”
Mohamed faces up to 20 years in prison or a $100,000 fine if found guilty, potentially joining an every-lengthening line of those who have taken food stamps as a privilege to be abused before being found out.
“Minneapolis didn’t become America’s fraud capital by accident,” Dalia al-Aqidi, a Republican running for Congress in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District against Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., told Fox News Digital. “It was earned. This week, it’s a grocer charged with running up $1.1 million in charges on other people’s EBT cards. Next week, it will be something else, but the bill always lands on the Minnesotans who actually pay taxes.”
Aqidi says families confide “affordability” is what “keeps them up nights” and lament the “cruel joke is that the money is here to really make a difference for people.”
“It is just lining the wrong pockets and paying for luxury cars and houses on the other side of the world. The fraudsters are only half the story. The other half are the people administering these programs, from the front lines all the way up to Ilhan Omar, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Governor Tim Walz. There has been talk about ending fraud in Minnesota for years. I am going to Washington to actually do it.”
Food stamp fraud schemes are being increasingly brought to light along with a myriad of other illicit schemes targeted by the Trump administration.
Just last February four Venezuelan migrants in Massachusetts were charged in a one million-dollar, multi-state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fraud, as Breitbart News reported.
U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley revealed food stamp fraud schemes are raging across half a dozen states and Puerto Rico and defrauded the SNAP program through the use of stolen identities.