I’ve been posting on Food Stamp Fraud ever since a convenience store in our county was raided due to allegations of fraud. I always put a disclaimer on those posts saying that as far as I knew refugees weren’t involved, just other immigrants who happened to also be members of the religion of peace.
Today this post was on one of my google alerts. It’s from something called the Ohio Attorney Lawyer. You can go here and see it. It’s so garbled and the English is so horrible I wondered how anything called Attorney Lawyer would get any business with such awful writing skills. So, I searched around with some words in that garbled post and came up with a story about Somalis being arrested a few years back for food stamp fraud.
This is from the article, 6 years old now, that began with the same story that the garbled post reported today. Read the whole article about how Somali asylees (just refugees who got here on their own steam and asked for asylum) have scammed the taxpayer. But here is an even more serious part of the scam:
Food stamp fraud has taken on more sinister dimensions within the last year and a half. Last autumn, the FBI determined that the Somali asylee community in Seattle, set with food stamps and other forms of public assistance, was targeted by the Al-Barakaat Wire Transfer company, a wire transfer and hawala banking outfit with known connections to Al Qaeda. Al-Barakaat set up a storefront in Seattle and immediately went to work selling Qat, a mild narcotic popular with Somalis, and converting food stamps to money for Somalis to send back to their relatives in Somalia. The FBI believes Al-Barakaat skimmed tens of millions of dollars off of the proceeds of these two activities, and funneled it directly to Al Qaeda.
Do you think the immigration lawyers who help these people get asylum ever feel guilty later when they learn their clients are crooks and possibly terrorists?
Then here is another Somali food stamp scam bust, in Ohio no less, and more recent (January of this year):
Eight men who ran four area food markets are accused of abusing federal food programs for the needy at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1.5 million, newly unsealed charges allege.
Federal officials announced the indictments and arrests yesterday, though six of the eight men were indicted on Jan. 10 and arrested Friday.
The indictments say that the owners and managers of two stores on the North Side and two on the West Side allowed their customers to use food stamps and WIC vouchers illegally. They permitted, authorities say, the exchange of the stamps and vouchers for cash and allowed people to use them to buy prepaid international phone cards and to pay off personal loans.
In some cases, the money also was laundered through U.S. bank accounts and wasn’t disclosed on tax returns, said IRS spokesman Craig Casserly.
All eight of the men indicted are Somali immigrants who were in the country legally but are not U.S. citizens.
I wonder where those eight are now. Prison? Deported? or loose in a city near you?