Longtime readers know that writing about food stamp fraud perpetrated at mom & pop immigrant-run stores is my hobby along with my other charitable work of writing about refugee resettlement. Last night there was a breakthrough in the mainstream media when Bill O’Reilly had a segment on trafficking in food stamps and how much of your money is being lost through that form of fraud!
He had on an expert from the CATO Institute, Chris Edwards, who estimated that food stamp fraud is costing the US government $3 billion a year, far above the Dept. of Agriculture’s $750 million estimate. When I find a link for the segment I’ll post it here. O’Reilly seemed genuinely surprised at how the trafficking scam works. For new readers, ‘customers’ in possession of food stamps (nearly 50 million people now!) sell them to the store for usually 50 cents on the dollar—customer gets his 50 cents and the store turns the full dollar in to the feds for repayment. LOL! Redistribution of wealth anyone!
And, of course O’Reilly and Edwards never mentioned any connections to immigrant-run stores and probably never will—too politically incorrect to notice such a thing?
The second media breakthrough on a fraud story came yesterday also in this news account of a convenience store bust in Daytona. The news account actually told the reader where these alleged scammers are from! Usually readers are left to guess just where this supposedly LEGAL immigrant, with a non-American sounding name, came from.
From the Daytona Beach News Journal (be sure to read the whole story because these perps did a slightly different form of the trafficking scam):
DAYTONA BEACH — A Ridgewood Avenue convenience store owner and his son were arrested Monday after Daytona Beach police, state and federal agents raided his business in connection with a food stamp scam, a police spokesman said.
Bassam Sale Abu Diab, 55, a native of Israel, and his son, Matthew Bassam Abu Diab, born in the U.S., were each charged with three counts of misappropriating public assistance funds, making misrepresentations to a credit card issuer, obtaining property by fraud and communications fraud.
Daytona Beach police, Daytona Beach Code Enforcement, The U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Florida Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Department of Revenue served two search warrants Monday morning on the Diabs, said police spokesman Jimmie Flynt.
The raid Monday was the culmination of an investigation into the food stamp fraud that started in December. Search warrants were served at 4M Food Mart at 740 North Ridgewood Ave. and at the Abu Diabs’ home at 221 Gala Circle, Flynt said.
The execution of the warrants resulted in the seizure of $23,000 and a vehicle. A tally of the receipts show that at least $88,000 in Electronic Benefit Transfer transactions were made at the store, and the amount did not include the value of the merchandise the Abu Diabs bought at Walmart and Save-A-Lot stores in the area, Flynt said. [The amount of money ripped off here is smaller than many other food stamp fraud cases we’ve reported, some have reached upwards of a million dollars. They must have nabbed this pair early—ed].
[…..]
The investigation focused on the illegal use of EBT (food stamp) cards. Investigations revealed that 4M Food Mart employees purchased the cards and paid between 20 and 40 cents on the dollar after using the cards to buy goods at Walmart and Save-A-Lot stores, police arrest reports show.
Sounds like these guys are cheapskates only returning 20-40 cents on the dollar, it is usually 50 cents, but when you read the rest of the story, it looks like their version of the scam does return 50 cents to the ‘customer.’
Also, be sure to watch the news footage about this bust, here, where Abu Diab, the younger, reportedly swears at arresting officers.
Wouldn’t you love to know how the senior came to be in the US, which of our highly-praised LEGAL immigration programs got him here. Maybe junior’s mom gave birth to junior here and then the old man was able to gain entry through his son? I guess it’s too much to hope for that a real investigative reporter would find out the immigration status of Dad. Nevertheless, we should be grateful that this reporter, Patricio G. Balona, told us this much.
LOL! I would not be surprised though to learn that this pair is Palestinian and the reporter could only go so far as to report “native of Israel.”
For more on food stamp fraud at immigrant-run stores, just type ‘food stamp fraud’ into our search function and I bet I have a hundred stories similar to this one spanning the last five years.
An afterthought: If you are on twitter help get this story out!