“Somali Fraud” Isn't a Statistic, No Matter How Many Times You Say It

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we discussed the legal terminology of fraud and explored the “Fraud Math” of our health care system. There are many types of fraud: wire fraud, mail fraud, health care fraud, bank fraud, securities fraud, tax fraud and plenty of others. One type that isn't on the list is Somali fraud.

Because there is no category called Somali fraud. It doesn't exist.

The federal crime and sentencing statistics we're using don't report a “Somali fraud rate,” and the Minnesota court records don't provide a systematic ethnicity dataset that would allow us to calculate one. Minnesota can have a fraud problem—every state can have fraud. What Minnesota does not have is a previously unknown branch of criminal law called Somali fraud. Or Klingon fraud. Or Kryptonian fraud. There is no ethnic category of fraud, no matter how many times pundits say it.

For some population context, the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey selected-population profile estimated about 76,320 Somali people in Minnesota, with a margin of error of plus or minus 12,542. That still does not give us a fraud rate. Feeding Our Future's conviction count is a count of defendants across the entire scheme, not a count of Somali defendants, and the population estimate includes children and adults. Dividing those two numbers would be Fraud Math wearing a fake mustache.

The indictment has wire transfers. The internet has ancestry estimates.

We'll stick with the indictment.

None of this means Minnesota's fraud scandals weren't real. Unfortunately, the actual fraud is plenty bad enough.

Feeding Our Future was a Minnesota nonprofit participating as a sponsor in federal child-nutrition programs. As proven at trial, founder and executive director Aimee Bock oversaw a scheme involving fake meal counts, fake attendance rosters, shell companies, bribes and kickbacks. We are not going to determine Bock's ethnicity by looking at her name and photograph, because we literally just finished explaining why that isn't data.

DOJ says Feeding Our Future fraudulently obtained and disbursed more than $240 million in federal child-nutrition funds. The organization's growth was extraordinary: it went from receiving and disbursing approximately $3.4 million in federal funds in 2019 to nearly $200 million in 2021.

Bock was convicted at trial. In May 2026, she was sentenced to 500 months—more than 41 years—in federal prison. And as of July 2026, federal prosecutors had obtained 68 convictions across the broader Feeding Our Future investigation.

By August 18, 2026, DOJ said 23 Feeding Our Future defendants had been sentenced. Abdiaziz Shafii Farah received 28 years in prison and was ordered to pay about $47.9 million in restitution for his role in the nutrition-program fraud. Abdimajid Mohamed Nur received 10 years and was ordered to pay about $47.9 million in restitution for the group of sites involved in his case. Abdullahe Nur Jesow received 43 months and was ordered to pay $866,458 in restitution.

Those are examples, not an ethnic tally. The government's 68-conviction figure covers the Feeding Our Future prosecution as a whole, and the court records do not give us a systematic Somali/non-Somali breakdown. That distinction matters if someone tries to turn a defendant count into a claim about an entire community.

We therefore do not need to invent an ethnic theory of fraud to make this scandal sound serious. The court records are doing just fine on their own.

The Minnesota cases do show networks. That's not controversial. It's in the records. Family members worked together, as they do in mob families. Friends worked together, because apparently Ocean's Eleven was not intended as an instructional film. Business owners worked with intermediaries. Participants paid kickbacks. People recruited other people.

In one Feeding Our Future group, DOJ described multiple family members and friends who pleaded guilty in a scheme involving $14.6 million. Another federal plea agreement documents approximately $7.1 million obtained through the nutrition program and more than $150,000 in kickbacks paid to a Feeding Our Future employee.

Those connections matter. They help explain how a fraud scheme spreads. If your cousin tells you he has discovered a remarkably profitable way to steal government money and you join him, investigators have discovered an important relationship: your cousin.

They have not discovered a hereditary condition. Family relationships matter. Business relationships matter. Recruitment matters. Kickbacks matter.

“Somali” is not a mechanism.

A criminal network can contain people who share an ethnicity without their ethnicity causing the crime. Otherwise every sufficiently large family conspiracy would eventually require its own branch of genetics.

And before somebody starts looking for the Somali Fraud Gene on a chromosome, we should probably mention that we made that gene up three paragraphs ago.

There is another possible explanation for why Feeding Our Future became so enormous: Minnesota was spectacularly bad at stopping it.

That's not merely our assessment. Minnesota's own Office of the Legislative Auditor concluded that the Department of Education's inadequate oversight of Feeding Our Future created opportunities for fraud.

Between June 2018 and December 2021, MDE received at least 30 complaints involving Feeding Our Future or its sites. Its response was not always inspiring. According to the Legislative Auditor, MDE inappropriately asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about Feeding Our Future.

This is roughly the regulatory equivalent of asking your dog to investigate the disappearance of the steak. To the dog's credit, he has found no evidence of wrongdoing.

And no, Nick Shirley didn't discover Feeding Our Future either. MDE referred its fraud concerns to the FBI in 2021, federal agents executed search warrants in January 2022, and prosecutors began announcing charges that September. Shirley's viral Minnesota video arrived in December 2025. Apparently the FBI had already thought of going to Minnesota.

The auditor also found that MDE did not investigate some complaints and that some investigations it did conduct were inadequate.

There is an important counterpoint: MDE disputes the auditor's characterization. The department said its oversight met applicable standards, that it made effective referrals to law enforcement, and that responsibility for the fraud lies with the people who committed it.

Those positions are not mutually exclusive. Fraudsters can be responsible for committing fraud and government oversight can fail to catch them. More importantly, inadequate verification, complaint procedures and program controls give us something useful: mechanisms we can fix.

There is considerably less public-policy value in yelling “Somali” at them.

Feeding Our Future wasn't the end of Minnesota's problems. Federal prosecutors subsequently brought fraud cases involving Minnesota's autism-services benefit and its Housing Stabilization Services program.

Before we continue: these are separate fraud cases.

Some participants overlap. Some methods look familiar. That does not transform every suspicious dollar in every Minnesota program into one gigantic conspiracy.

In 2025, federal prosecutors charged Asha Farhan Hassan in a $14 million scheme involving Minnesota's Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention autism benefit. Hassan was also charged in Feeding Our Future. She later pleaded guilty to wire fraud in connection with the schemes.

That overlap matters. It gives us a documented connection between one participant and different programs.

Notice what we did there? We found a connection and described the connection.

No ancestry test required.

This is considerably easier when the evidence gives us an actual person connecting the schemes instead of asking us to connect them with an ethnicity.

Minnesota's Legislative Auditor later found another oversight issue involving EIDBI. DHS officials had maintained that, before 2025, the department lacked authority to investigate certain kickback allegations unless they also involved other qualifying conduct. The auditor concluded DHS had long possessed legal authority to address kickback allegations.

Then there's Housing Stabilization Services. DOJ said Minnesota's HSS program had low barriers to entry and minimal records requirements for reimbursement, conditions that combined to make it susceptible to fraud. Program payments grew from more than $21 million in 2021 to $104 million in 2024.

Fraud Math reminder: $104 million in program spending does not mean $104 million in fraud.

And then Anthony Jefferson and Lester Brown showed up.

The two men lived in Philadelphia. DOJ says they had no prior network or connection to Minnesota, heard the HSS program was a good opportunity to make money, repeatedly traveled there, enrolled as providers and billed for services they did not provide. They ultimately pleaded guilty to stealing approximately $3.5 million. When insurers requested documentation, DOJ says they used artificial intelligence to fabricate records.

Evidently Minnesota's fraud ecosystem became so exclusive to one ethnic community that two guys from Philadelphia heard about it and flew in.

Which suggests another possible mechanism: people were attracted to programs they believed were easy to exploit.

That is something we can actually investigate.

We should not overcorrect by pretending shared community, family or business networks can never matter. They can. The court records themselves document family relationships, recruitment, kickbacks and overlapping participants.

What those records do not establish is the next leap: shared ethnicity means a higher ethnic propensity for fraud.

And to reiterate a point because it matters: there is no government statistic called a “Somali fraud rate.”

The federal crime and sentencing systems we examined do not report one. The FBI does not publish fraud statistics under a “Somali” offender category. The U.S. Sentencing Commission does not publish a Somali fraud category. And the Minnesota court records we've examined do not systematically classify defendants by Somali ancestry or ethnicity.

So when someone says Somali people commit fraud at a higher rate, there is a fairly basic question to ask:

Higher than whom, based on what government statistic?

Because a list of defendants with names somebody believes sound Somali is not a denominator. It isn't even reliable ethnicity data.

You cannot calculate a Somali fraud rate from data that does not identify Somali fraud offenders as a statistical population.

And the records already give us considerably better things to investigate: fake meal counts, fake attendance rosters, shell companies, kickbacks, family and business networks, weak verification, programs with low barriers to entry, inadequate oversight, participants recruiting other participants, and—in some cases—people moving between exploitable government programs.

Those facts help explain how fraud happens.

“Somali” can describe nationality, ancestry or ethnicity depending on context. It does not explain how a fake attendance roster becomes a wire transfer.

There are legitimate questions about why Minnesota experienced so much fraud, whether particular networks repeatedly exploited government programs, why state oversight failed and whether officials responded quickly enough.

Ask them. Open the indictments. Read the audits. Follow the money.

But replacing defendants, companies, bank accounts, program rules, kickbacks, plea agreements and convictions with an ethnicity doesn't solve the case. It removes most of the evidence.

“Somali fraud” takes a complicated collection of people, programs, companies, networks, government failures and court records—and replaces all of it with one adjective.

Which is an impressive amount of information to lose in two words.