Tag: food stamp fraud

Gary,Indiana massive food stamp fraud arrest, Mohammad coefficient 100%

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update March 23rd:  The Mohammad family indicted, here.

Can you believe it!  There are three Mohammads  in this latest food stamp fraud arrest!  The names sound Somali, but I’m just guessing—the media rarely tells us an immigrant criminal’s ethnicity!   If readers from Indiana learn more, please let us know!

And, get this—they shipped the money out of the country!  Surprise (not!).

I wonder if these businesses got their starts with government-funded micro-loans!  How else are twenty-somethings owning stores.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Two Gary, Ind., food marts let people use their food stamps like a normal debit card, giving them cash back and cigarettes in exchange.

In return, they illegally redeemed those food stamps to the federal government for more than $500,000, according to two federal indictments filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Hammond.

Now Ola Mohammad, 31, and her brother Abdkdar Mohammad, 29, both of Chicago, face one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and three counts of wire fraud.

Kaled Mohammad, 27, of Cicero, Ill., faces two counts of wire fraud in a separate but similar case. It was unclear Friday if he is related to Ola and Abdkdar Mohammad.

Court records say Ola Mohammad used her store, Moses Foods, at 1330 Broadway, to allow customers to purchase cigarettes and receive money back through their food stamps.

For instance, on Nov. 22, one customer bought a bag of Cheetos, a 2-liter bottle soda and a pack of cigarettes, and received $40 back in cash, all paid for from a food stamps card. The siblings redeemed the food stamps from the federal government for $4,735,850 through the illegal scheme, according to the indictment.

The money was sent to a bank account that both Ola Mohammad and her father could access, then was wired outside the country.

Although Ola Mohammad is the sole owner of the business, her brother assisted her and works there as a cashier. The indictment claims the scheme lasted from February 2010 to June.

Abdkdar was arrested Thursday and ordered held without bond pending a detention hearing and arraignment set for Monday afternoon. Court records did not show if Ola Mohammad has been arrested.

In a separate case, an indictment claims Kaled Mohammad conducted a similar but smaller scheme at his store, Kay Mart, at 4845 Broadway.

As with Moses Mart, Kaled Mohammad allowed customers to use their food stamp card to purchase cigarettes and receive cash back. The indictment claims he redeemed those food stamps from the federal government for about $60,000.

Kaled Mohammad was also arrested Monday and ordered held without bond pending a detention hearing and arraignment set for Monday afternoon.

Gary is only 30 miles from Chicago so these must all be Illinois immigrant spillovers involved.  BTW, Food stamp use among refugees is up sharply, here.

For more on cases like this one, type ‘food stamp fraud’ into our search function and dozens of stories will appear!

Addendum:  I almost forgot, two years ago this month there was another food stamp fraud bust involving another immigrant-run store in Gary (here).  I wondered then why these scammers don’t get the message from busts going on around them.

Waukegan grocer gets 2 1/2 years for food stamp fraud; no deportation mentioned

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update of a story we posted previously, here and here.  It’s the one that made me laugh so much because when the feds busted them the wife put hundreds of thousands of dollars in a suitcase, grabbed her mom and tried to make a run for it.

Khaled and Fatima Saleh who own Sun (aka Sunset) Food Market, located at 1501 Sunset Ave. in Waukegan, were found guilty of food stamp fraud. Note that the store name has been altered. | Ryan Pagelow~Sun-Times Media

Here is the sentencing news from last week:

CHICAGO (NBC) — An Illinois grocer was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in federal prison Monday for defrauding government and nutrition programs.

Khaled Saleh, 48, the owner of Sunset Food Market in Waukegan was charged with illegally exchanging cash with customers using food stamp cards and nutrition coupons during an undercover investigation.

Saleh was sentenced to 30 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle.

Saleh, along with his wife, Fatima Saleh, 37, acquired more than $844,000 by paying customers approximately half the value in cash for goods purchased at other stores using their benefits.

They then re-sold the same items in their store at a substantially higher price.

[….]

The couple was arrested in May 2011 and both pleaded guilty last August to conspiracy to defraud government programs.

The government forfeited $391,616 in cash and bank account funds that were seized from the Salehs, and Khaled Saleh was ordered to pay $453,013 in restitution for the remaining balance.

Sentencing for Fatima Saleh has been postponed to March 22.

Then this is from the original US Attorneys Office Press Release from 2011:

After the search of the store, Fatima Saleh went to her apartment and agents observed her leaving a short time later with a suitcase and her mother.

After giving consent to search the suitcase, agents found more than $350,000 cash and more than 800 coupon vouchers for the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC)*, a supplemental food program to provide a more nutritious diet to low-income infants, young children and pregnant and post-partum women.

Agents later discovered an additional $25,000 cash in the couple’s apartment.

The indictment seeks forfeiture of approximately $377,000 seized on April 26, as well as more than $14,500 seized from Sunset Food’s bank account.

Don’t you think this story is interesting enough to make the national news especially as wasteful government spending is the topic of the day—fat chance!—the Saleh’s are likely members in good standing of the Religion of Peace and CAIR would be on the news outlet like white on rice.

LOL! These must be some of the immigrants ‘finding their way’ to smaller US cities to set up business that Professor Kotkin admires.

* Does this mean 800 people sold her their WIC cards???   Note to refugees (70% of whom are using food stamps):  Do not sell your benefits, it is as much against the law as buying them!

Investigation: Nearly 20,000 ‘Mom and Pop’ stores involved in trafficking food stamps

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

First, according to Hot Air which tipped us off to this news:

During President Obama’s first term in office, participation in the federal food stamp program increased from about 32 million Americans in 2009 to approximately 48 million by October of 2012 — an average growth rate of just over 11,000 recipients per day…..

And, now the Obama Agriculture Department is going to crack down (they say!) on the practice of swapping food stamps for cash—a practice I believe is behind the sharp rise in food stamp use (not that we have more hungry people)!

RRW readers know that Food Stamp Fraud has been a side interest of mine ever since I noticed a trend in who is actually committing the fraud—immigrant store owners and their customers.*  If you search RRW for ‘food stamp fraud’ you will very quickly see exactly who I mean (LOL! the ‘Mohammad’ coefficient is very high).

Mohammad Khan was busted for trafficking food stamps in this convenience store in Hagerstown, MD in 2008. Joe Crocetta, Staff Photographer Hagerstown Herald Mail

I believe there is an international understanding that all one needs to do is to get an “investor” visa, buy a cheap convenience store and set up the “trafficking” of SNAP (taxpayer) dollars from the patsies in the federal government to one’s wallet and to wallets across the world.

It works like this:  customer exchanges his benefit by receiving approximately 50 cents on every dollar exchanged.  The store owner then submits the charge for the full dollar to the government agency administering the program as if food has been purchased in that amount.   Some stores I’ve reported on have scammed the taxpayer to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars before being caught—prison terms are for less than 5 years generally (and although there may have been deportations, I don’t recall seeing one).

Here is The Hill yesterday (the last line is the best):

The Obama administration is taking additional steps to crack down on cash payments for food stamps.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Thursday announced it would take action against the “bad actors” who abuse the program by extending the legal definition of “trafficking” to include indirect ways of receiving cash for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

It is already illegal to sell SNAP benefits directly for cash, but the new rules would also bar cash refunds for products purchased with food stamps.

“Where there is a will to commit malfeasance, bad actors will try to find a way, and we must do everything we can to stay ahead of the curve,” said Agriculture Under Secretary Kevin Concannon. “Today’s announcement reaffirms USDA’s ongoing commitment to cracking down on abuse and protecting taxpayers’ investment in this critical nutrition lifeline.”

The USDA is also mulling a proposal to immediately freeze the payment of SNAP benefits to retailers “suspected of flagrant trafficking violations,” rather than waiting for an investigation to suspend the store’s ability to redeem the SNAP benefits. Comments are being accepted on the proposed rule.  [The investigations can take more than a year, as we saw in our local bust in 2008, so this is an important change.—ed]

Last year, the USDA permanently disqualified almost 1,400 retailers from participating in SNAP for exchanging cash for benefits or falsifying applications.

According to the most recent SNAP fraud report by the USDA, food stamp trafficking “diverted an estimated $330 million annually from SNAP benefits –— or about one cent of each SNAP dollar — between 2006 and 2008.”

Out of the nearly 240,000 stores active in the SNAP program, about 8.2 percent trafficked, according to the 2011 investigation.

Get that!  They disqualified 1,400 stores, but they estimate 8.2% are crooks!  If my math is correct 8.2% of 240,000 stores is 19,680 stores!  They have a long way to go!

*Note to “customers” who sell their stamps for cash, you are criminals and can be prosecuted too!

Update!  Here is a story from New Mexico with a greater variety of food stamp scamming techniques.  What does this tell you!

She said the biggest issue is people who sell their EBT card and report it lost or stolen. Out of the 138,927 cards issued to New Mexicans in 2012, more than 93,000 were replacement cards, Squier said. That’s about 70 percent.

 

NJ Muslim credit card scam called “massive,” largest in US history

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is not a refugee story, but fits nicely along with my other hobby—-immigrant food stamp fraud*.  Yesterday, reader Gary sent me this story and we wondered who the perps might be (other than the two ringleaders named, hint: their names were not Smith or Jones), but you can always count on Debbie Schlussel to get the real skinny!

Read Debbie Schlussel, here, for the whole story and to follow links.  Debbie begins (emphasis mine):

There are several crimes of which–whenever the schemes are foiled by the feds–I can almost always bet that the perpetrators come from a certain religion, culture, and region of the world, whose greatest export is its brazenness in working the system and screwing the infidels. Credit card fraud, mortgage fraud, Medicaid fraud, Medicare fraud, food stamp/Bridge Card fraud . . . these are the crimes whose perpetrators are overwhelmingly members in a religion that is still just a tiny percentage of our population but dominates these scams and rip-offs. And so it goes with yesterday’s announcement that the feds busted what is either the largest or one of the largest credit card fraud rings ever busted in U.S. history.

Keep reading, here.   Millions of scammed dollars wired around the world!

And then Debbie wraps with this which really made me laugh because I’ve noticed the same thing—99% of these stories never tell you how the scammers got to the US in the first place!

 Notice that there is nothing in the story about the citizenship or immigration status of these fine specimens of Paki-American cultural life.

I also wondered to myself if Gov. Chris Christie, defender of all things Islamic in NJ, had anything to say?

*See my extensive archive on Food Stamp Fraud, here.

Texas: Somali food stamp fraudster sentenced to prison; sent your money to Somalia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just redistributing your infidel wealth to the third world—what is wrong with that!

From the Star Telegram (hat tip: Gary):

FORT WORTH _ An Arlington convenience store owner was sentenced Friday to 57 months in federal prison for committing food stamp fraud, wire fraud, and running an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Ali Ugas Mohamud, who owned the Tawakal Grocery Store at 2440 South Collins Street, must also pay more than $1.4 million in restitution, $98,000 of which is due immediately, U.S. District Judge John McBryde ordered, according to a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s office.

According to court documents, Mohamud had applied for and was granted authorization in February 2004 for his store to participate in the food stamp program, the United States Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.

Beginning in 2009, however, Mohamud began occasionally exchanging food stamp benefits for cash or wired money to other individuals in Somalia using food stamp benefits, court documents state.

As part of his scheme, he also wired thousands of dollars from Affiliated Computer Services, Inc.,  which manages Lone Star cards for retailers, to his bank in Arlington between September 2008 and Februrary 2010.

Mohamud had pleaded guilty in October to seven counts of food stamp fraud, five counts of wire fraud and one count of conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business. McBryde sentenced him to 13 concurrent sentences of 57 months in federal prison on each count.

Here is the US Attorney’s office press release from last October when he was found guilty—this case must have slipped by me!

Believe me, this blog isn’t Somali Immigrant Watch even if it seems like it sometimes!

For new readers, our immigrant food stamp fraud archive is here.