“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who brought the new charges. “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”
Court filings allege the men submitted up to $3.5 million in “fake and inflated bills” for Medicaid reimbursements after they set up a company intended to provide housing and other services to individuals who qualified for the program. They allegedly fleeced the housing program in Minnesota despite “living on the other side of the country and having no network in or connections to Minnesota or its communities.”
In a separate indictment filed Thursday, a man allegedly registered a company to help channel state resources to the families of children with autism. But the man, Abdinajib Hassan Yussef, allegedly spent some of the $6 million he took from the program on the purchase of a Freightliner semi-truck.
The new indictments came as the Trump administration and its allies have stepped up attacks on Minnesota’s leadership, including Gov. Tim Walz, who was the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president in the 2024 elections.