The state and federal feeding and housing programs meant to help kids and vulnerable families in Minnesota have been rocked by what investigators now call a massive fraud operation, with bogus providers, dead addresses and millions billed to Medicaid and other programs. A recent on-the-ground review found dozens of suspicious locations tied to the scheme, revealing how easily money flowed to shells and empty storefronts. Republican officials point to lax oversight and demand answers as taxpayer funds sit unaccounted for.
Federal authorities say one downtown St. Paul building became a hub for sham providers connected to the HSS program, and the pattern looks intentional. Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson described many of those entities as “purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system.” What investigators found on site backed up the formal language: lots of paperwork, and very little real operation.
Investigators tally 22 supposed businesses linked to that single Griggs-Midway address, and those names turned up tens of millions in claims. The group billed Medicaid for roughly $8 million between January 2024 and May 2025, a glaring example of how program rules were exploited. That scale should make any regulator sit up and demand immediate reforms.
The building’s southern side looked abandoned during the visit, with a banner stuck above the sign advertising available space. A few men gathered near the entrance and declined to engage, claiming they did not speak English when approached. Meanwhile, the western wing hosted actual storefronts, creating a strange mix of the legitimate and the phony under one roof.
On the building’s first floor there were useful community services — a hair salon, a financial support operation geared to new African arrivals, and a property manager’s office — but none matched many of the billing names. The mess is one reason investigators are chasing paper trails and interviewing property owners to sort out where real work happened and where it did not. The separation between real tenants and ghost companies highlights how flimsy the system’s checks were.
After FBI searches, state authorities launched roughly 40 reviews tied to providers in and around the Griggs-Midway building. Those reviews aim to untangle legitimate services from the ones that were simply billing machines. A few high-billing names emerged quickly and drew particular scrutiny.
One company flagged was Brilliant Minds Services, which reportedly submitted over $2.3 million in claims from the Griggs-Midway location and ranked among the top HSS billers statewide. Federal prosecutors charged four people in connection with the broader fraud effort: Moktar Hassan Aden, 30; Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29; Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26; and Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27. Mohamed is accused of owning one of the implicated companies, Foundation First Services LLC.
OMAR ACCUSED BY GOP OPPONENT OF OPENING UP THE DOOR TO MASSIVE MINNEAPOLIS FRAUD: ‘DEEP, DEEP TIES’ The political fallout is immediate, with Republican critics arguing elected leaders let oversight slip. That charge matters, because oversight failures allowed fraud to reach this size without quicker intervention.
Fox reporters traced claims to odd locations across the metro, including a locked second-floor walkup above a sushi spot near the Mississippi River. The unit was inaccessible during the visit, leaving it unclear whether anyone actually operated from that space or if the address was a convenient fiction. A window sign read “No Kings, No Fascists” while the interior looked largely unused.
Another stop, a boxy structure known as Winsor Plaza, listed dozens of legitimate tenants in its directory but no trace of the suite mentioned on a particular claim. The alleged office — Unit 150 — appeared not to exist in the building’s current layout. In other cases, parking-lot pillars showed an address but no multi-suite complex, and the only active business at the site was a dental office.
Some locations did contain real service providers, like counseling centers and cleaning firms at 2756 Douglas Dr N, but the fraudulent names tied to claims never showed up on site. Other addresses were deserted: a garage tucked behind a church at 1541 Como Ave looked unused with leaves and snow piled on the picnic bench outside. Locals recalled a man nicknamed “John” who ran a pop-up gym there at times, but nothing suggested a functioning billing operation.
Empty lots and wrong block numbers turned up too; at one listed address the street simply has no 400s, only 500s. Another claimed property on E Lake St was boarded and tagged with graffiti, with a person sleeping outside. These mismatches make it obvious that many claims relied on paper addresses rather than real service sites.
“Most of that $500 million hasn’t served a single meal and some of the simple things are if they would have just gone to the facilities, you know, you hear of the thousands of people being served out of an apartment twice a day, all they would have to do is show up and look at it,” Minnesota Republican state Sen. Mark Koran told Fox News Digital about the fraud that was hiding in plain sight in Minneapolis. “There was an legislative auditor report that showed that 30 property owners where these businesses claim to operate out of, contacted the Department of Education who manage it, who managed that program, and they told them one, the businesses don’t exist in their facilities, so they don’t exist, period, and one of them I think was a city park,” Koran said.
“And so the Department of Education gave that complaint to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future to address those issues and the Department of Education continued to pay millions to those thirty with a blatant, simple process of ‘we’ve been notified they don’t exist’ and they rejected and ignored it.” The political demand now is for accountability and hard, immediate fixes so taxpayer dollars stop lining the pockets of sham operators.
