‘Fraud tourists’ travel to Minnesota — ‘Easy to make money ripping off state.’

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This is straight-up audacity on a national scale. People are literally hopping states just to hit taxpayer programs like slot machines. Millions meant for the disabled and struggling addicts vanished while the fraudsters lived hundreds of miles away with zero real connection to the communities they ripped off. Minnesota did not fail they got exploited because the system was wide open for anyone with boldness and zero shame. That is the part nobody in the headlines wants you to dwell on. This is not just theft it is a blueprint other fraud tourists are watching closely.

“Fraud tourists” traveled to Minnesota after a friend told them state programs were “a good opportunity to make money,” prosecutors say

Federal prosecutors announced new indictments Thursday in the widening Minnesota fraud scandal, this time involving two Philadelphia-based men accused of traveling to Minneapolis after a friend told them the taxpayer-funded programs there presented “a good opportunity to make money.”

Anthony Waddel Jefferson and Lester Brown are accused of siphoning millions from federally funded programs administered by Minnesota officials that were meant to help people with disabilities and those suffering from addiction.

Unlike many of the individuals previously caught up in the state’s sprawling fraud scandal, they don’t appear to have ties to Minnesota’s large Somali-American community. Prosecutors say they don’t appear to have ties to Minnesota at all.

“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who brought the new charges. “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”

Court filings allege the men submitted up to $3.5 million in “fake and inflated bills” for Medicaid reimbursements after they set up a company intended to provide housing and other services to individuals who qualified for the program. They allegedly fleeced the housing program in Minnesota despite “living on the other side of the country and having no network in or connections to Minnesota or its communities.”

Jefferson and Brown were among six people indicted for fraud on Thursday.

Abdinajib Hassan allegedly registered a company to help channel state resources to the families of children with autism, spending some of the $6 million he took from the program on the purchase of a Freightliner semi-truck.