Tag: welfare

Not Just the Somalis: Nigerian Honored by Gretchen Whitmer Exposed as Massive Day Care Fraudster – Stole While Trashing America’s ‘Structural Racism’

Michigan might have its own fraud scandal brewing.

After widespread fraud was uncovered in Minnesota’s day care and other government-funded social service programs, most of them run by people linked to the immigrant Somali community, the public’s crosshairs turned to state officials, particularly Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. Surely these people were not stealing billions from hardworking Americans without having help from public officials?

Similar questions may soon be asked in Michigan of its own programs and its Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

A former professor, Nigerian immigrant Nkechy Ezeh, pleaded guilty last month to wire fraud and tax evasion in a scheme that defrauded Michigan taxpayers out of over $1 million, according to news site MLive.

The misappropriated money had been intended for Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative, an early childhood education program for disadvantaged children. Ezeh was the founder and CEO of ELNC.

“The nonprofit closed in 2023 after Ezeh and former Director of Finance and Administration Sharon Killebrew were accused of embezzling more than $2.5 million combined over several years,” WZZM-TV reported.

Killebrew, 70, was sentenced to four years and six months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud a federally funded program, according to MLive.

Ezeh faces 20 years for wire fraud. The charge of tax evasion could carry an additional five years in prison.

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Fraud as Policy: The Incentives of the Modern Welfare State

The scale of fraud uncovered in recent years has exposed how government transfer programs function, even as meaningful public or legislative reckoning remains largely absent. What began as a series of pandemic-related scandals has revealed something broader and more troubling: large-scale fraud is not an anomaly within the modern welfare state. The federal government, taxpayers, lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from 2018 to 2022.

It is a predictable outcome of systems that distribute vast sums of money without market discipline, rely on third-party payment structures, and diffuse responsibility across layers of bureaucracy. As Murray Rothbard argued, welfare gains can only be demonstrated through voluntary exchange, while state transfer programs necessarily rely on coercion and therefore cannot be said, in economic terms, to increase social welfare, only to redistribute resources while masking loss.

Minnesota provides one of the clearest illustrations of this dynamic, especially since a private reporter revealed massive fraud in the state at the end of last year. In the Feeding Our Future scandal, federal prosecutors alleged that more than $250 million intended for child nutrition was siphoned through non-profit organizations that billed the government for meals that were never served. A federal judge has since ordered the forfeiture of more than $52 million connected to the scheme, underscoring both the scale of the losses and the failure of oversight mechanisms designed to prevent them. The case involved federal funds administered by state agencies and distributed through private entities, with little meaningful verification before reimbursement.

This was not an isolated incident. Prosecutors in Minnesota have charged defendants in a wide range of fraud schemes involving pandemic unemployment benefits, economic injury disaster loans, autism-related health services, transportation programs, and other federally funded initiatives. These cases mirror prosecutions across the country. In Texas, defendants have been sentenced for multi-million-dollar disaster relief fraud. In Massachusetts, companies have paid millions to resolve allegations of PPP loan fraud and emergency rental assistance schemes. Similar cases appear regularly in Department of Justice press releases, spanning Medicare covid testing fraud, SNAP abuse, PPP and EIDL loan abuse, unemployment insurance fraud, and false claims against federal health care benefit programs.

Nationally, the numbers are staggering. Government watchdogs have estimated that fraud in pandemic unemployment programs alone may exceed $100 billion. Well over 200 billion was lost to fraudulent PPP and EIDL claims. Medicare billing schemes tied to covid testing generated billions in false claims. These figures do not represent marginal losses. They reflect a system operating at a scale where fraud becomes organized, repeatable, and profitable.

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Eyes on California: 18% of Total US Home Health Care Billing Is Coming Out of LA County – One Doctor Billed Govt. for $120 Million IN ONE YEAR!

The Trump Administration and Dr. Mehmut Oz, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, have turned their attention to Los Angeles County and the massive amount of alleged medical fraud that is being reported from California.

According to FOX News, one LA doctor billed the government $120 million, claiming to oversee 1900 patients… in one year!

18% of THE ENTIRE COUNTRY’S home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles County! Almost 20%!

And, Los Angeles has almost 2,000 registered hospice agencies! That is more than 36 states combined and thirty-times more than the whole state of Florida and New York.

Dr. Oz explained how easy it would be to open a hospice in LA, you don’t even have to live there!

Dr. Oz: “How is that possible? And take a look at this map, a cluster of 287 hospice providers, in a two-mile radius, some in strip malls, unmarked buildings, even a wrecking yard and vacant lot. All of it is just paperwork. I could fill that out in Kazakhstan if I want and get a hospice license waiting for me.”

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$50 Billion and 30K Dead People: HUD’s Turner Exposes Waste, Fraud and Abuse

HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced new policy changes aimed at restricting federal housing benefits to U.S. citizens, tightening oversight of taxpayer-funded programs, and addressing what he described as large-scale waste and payment errors within the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Turner said HUD has moved to block non-permanent residents from accessing FHA-insured mortgages, while also launching audits of public housing authorities to ensure federal housing dollars are not being used to support illegal aliens.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced new policy changes aimed at restricting federal housing benefits to U.S. citizens, tightening oversight of taxpayer-funded programs, and addressing what he described as large-scale waste and payment errors within the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Turner said HUD has moved to block non-permanent residents from accessing FHA-insured mortgages, while also launching audits of public housing authorities to ensure federal housing dollars are not being used to support illegal aliens.

“We eliminated non permanent residents eligibility for FHA insured mortgages, and we are auditing public housing authorities to ensure taxpayer dollars don’t support illegal aliens,” Turner said.

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Jailed Fraud Queen Drops Bombshell: Walz, Ellison Knew About the $250M Heist All Along

A Minnesota woman convicted in one of the largest welfare fraud schemes in state history is alleging that Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud long before federal prosecutors intervened, adding new scrutiny to state leadership already facing a Department of Justice investigation.

Aimee Bock, the former head of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, made the allegations during a jailhouse interview with Fox News from Sherburne County Jail in Minnesota.

Bock has been convicted of welfare fraud tied to the misuse of federal funds intended for child nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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JD Vance: California Fraud Dwarfs Theft of Federal Funds in Minnesota

Vice President JD Vance revealed this week that about $7 billion worth of Small Business Administration (SBA) fraud has been discovered in California, an indicator the theft of federal funds across all departments in the Golden State could well exceed any other state’s.

“I think we have a fraud problem that is much worse in California than it is in Minnesota,” Vance said in an interview Thursday with Newsmax.

He continued, “I was talking actually to our small business administrator and I think she found probably a half billion dollars of fraud in Minneapolis and the broader Minnesota area. I think she’s found 7 billion dollars worth of fraud in California.”

“This is unfortunately a problem that is much bigger than Minnesota,” he added. ”But it also highlights how absurd this effort to prevent immigration enforcement is.”

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Legislation Proposed To Make It Easier To Denaturalize Somali Fraudsters

In the wake of the massive Somali-fraud scandal out of Minnesota and other states, President Donald Trump wants to denaturalize American immigrants convicted of crimes and deport them, but the current legal framework and federal bureaucracy make such sweeping denaturalization efforts difficult to achieve quickly. 

“I would do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest,” Trump told the New York Times earlier this month. “I think that many of the people that came in from Somalia, they hate our country.”

Existing federal law provides limited pathways for revoking the citizenship of naturalized citizens. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act the government can denaturalize individuals who obtained citizenship through fraud, misrepresentation, or the concealment of material facts during the naturalization process. The law does not allow automatic revocation based solely on crimes committed after naturalization. Current denaturalization proceedings require civil lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice in federal court or criminal prosecutions for naturalization fraud, both demanding individualized evidence, extensive litigation, and meeting high burdens of proof. Civil cases require “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence,” while criminal prosecutions demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) has proposed a solution to this problem. He’s introduced the Stop Citizenship Abuse and Misrepresentation (SCAM) Act in the Senate to expand federal denaturalization authority. The legislation creates a 10-year window after naturalization during which citizens who commit specified crimes could face citizenship revocation and deportation. Among those offenses are welfare fraud exceeding $10,000, aggravated felonies, espionage, and joining terrorist organizations, a category the bill explicitly extends to gangs and drug cartels. The measure also lowers the threshold for federal authorities to begin denaturalization proceedings by broadening the legal grounds beyond fraud committed during the citizenship application process.

The bill even includes a fallback provision that automatically reduces the revocation window from ten years to five years if courts strike down the longer period as unconstitutional.

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Aimee Bock, “mastermind” of Minnesota’s biggest fraud scheme, says “I wish I could go back and do things differently”

The Trump administration has justified its ongoing immigration crackdown in Minnesota by citing a need to curb fraud and pointing to a widening scandal involving members of the Somali American community. Yet prosecutors say the mastermind of the state’s biggest fraud scheme to date was not Somali but a White woman — 45-year-old Aimee Bock. 

In an exclusive interview from her jail cell, Bock defended her conduct, admitted regrets and argued that state officials who she worked with should bear some of the blame. It was the first time Bock spoke publicly since she was arrested for her role in what prosecutors say was a $250 million COVID-era effort to defraud a federal program to feed hungry children. 

“I wish I could go back and do things differently, stop things, catch things,” said Bock, who was the head of Feeding Our Future, the now-infamous nonprofit that signed up restaurants and caterers to receive taxpayer money for providing meals to kids. “I believed we were doing everything in our power to protect the program.”

So far, prosecutors have charged 78 defendants connected to Feeding Our Future, with more than 60 pleading guilty or convicted at trial. Nearly all are East African or of Somali descent, except for Aimee Bock.

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BUSTED: California Ordered to Return $1+ BILLION After Dr. Oz–Led Audit Exposes Federal Healthcare Funds Spent on Illegal Immigrants

The Trump administration has dropped the hammer on California and a coalition of deep-blue states after a sweeping federal audit uncovered more than $1.3 billion in misused federal healthcare funds spent on non-emergency medical care for illegal immigrants, a clear violation of federal law.

According to a bombshell report highlighted on Fox News, the administration’s aggressive audits, led by Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz, found that seven states and Washington, D.C., improperly billed the federal government for healthcare services that go far beyond what is legally permitted.

Under federal law, states may only use federal Medicaid funds to cover emergency medical services for illegal immigrants. Routine care, elective procedures, and non-emergency treatments must be paid for by the states themselves.

That did not happen.

Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli wrote on X, “California must return more than $1 billion to the federal government after an audit by Dr. Oz and his team uncovered federal dollars being spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants. We are teaming up to combat healthcare fraud so the money can be used for American citizens who need it!”

Federal auditors identified nearly $1.4 billion owed back to U.S. taxpayers, with California alone accounting for the overwhelming majority:

  • California: ~$1.3 billion
  • New York: ~$30.7 million
  • Illinois: ~$29.8 million
  • Minnesota: ~$12.7 million
  • Oregon: ~$5.4 million
  • Washington: ~$2.3 million
  • Washington, D.C.: ~$2.1 million
  • Colorado: ~$1.5 million
  • TOTAL: ~$1.394 billion

These funds were billed to the federal government for routine medical care, not emergencies, an explicit violation of Medicaid rules.

California officials predictably denied wrongdoing, claiming the state “routinely reimburses” the federal government. But the audit findings directly contradict those claims—and the financial damage is already done.

Governor Gavin Newsom has long championed “universal healthcare regardless of immigration status,” proudly expanding taxpayer-funded care to the state’s entire undocumented population.

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Ohio Physician Gets 5 Years in Prison for Role in $14.5M Medicare Fraud

An Ohio doctor has been sentenced to prison for his role in a healthcare billing conspiracy scheme that was intended to fraudulently bill Medicare for more than $14.5 million.

Timothy Sutton, 44, of North Ridgeville, Ohio, was sentenced 5 years and 4 months in prison by U.S. District Judge David A. Ruiz, after he pleaded guilty in April 2025 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud, false statements related to health care matters, and aggravated identity theft. He was also ordered to serve 3 years of supervised release and pay nearly $6 million in restitution to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Judge Ruiz imposed the sentence on Jan. 12.

According to court documents, Sutton used his position as a licensed medical doctor in the state of Ohio to cause submission of claims on behalf of patients who did not need the medical treatment. He was employed by two telemedicine companies based in Florida which provided him with pre-completed orders for durable medical equipment (DME), such as braces, and/or cancer genetic testing (CGX) for him to approve and digitally sign. 

“Mr. Sutton deliberately lied about performing patient examinations and then used his role as a trusted medical professional to line his pockets at the expense of taxpayers. We will not tolerate those who utilize their positions of authority to defraud Medicare, or any government agency,” said United States Attorney David M. Toepfer for the Northern District of Ohio. “Thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Cleveland FBI’s thorough investigations, we have put a stop to this rampant fraud and abuse of power.”

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