Minnesota fraud scandal raises alarms over vulnerable money pipelines to extremists

There’s another chilling aspect to ongoing fraud investigations in Minnesota’s Somali community: possible links to jihad.

President Donald Trump’s new national security strategy seeks to continue from the days when the Middle East dominated foreign policy. But Minnesota welfare fraud schemes are a warning sign. Closing the door to the ideology of radical Islam and its rapacious tentacles in America may be harder than it seems.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Scott Bessent was concerned enough to launch an investigation into whether money had been funneled from Minnesota to the infamous Al Shabaab jihadist group in Somalia.

“A huge amount of money was transferred from the people who were running this scam,” Bessent told Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” earlier this month. Much of that money “went abroad, and we’re tracking it to both the Middle East and Somalia to see what it does,” he said.

The real motive, of course, was “pure, insatiable greed,” as U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel said at the Aug. 6 sentencing of Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, who was found guilty of a $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program. However, the real question is whether the large amount of money sent to Somalia directly or indirectly benefits terrorist networks.

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The target is foreign currency. Somalia’s GDP in 2024 was only $12 billion. Last year, cash flows from the United States to Somalia totaled approximately $215 million. ISIS in Somalia operates a digital hawala network that finances operations across Africa to finance terrorism, according to an October 7 report by the African Defense Forum.

Americans aren’t the only ones dealing with concerns about fraud, suspicious money flows and terrorist connections.

On November 24, Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that more than $100 million of Swedish taxpayer crowns earmarked for kindergartens and schools in Sweden had been siphoned off by an Islamist network running a welfare fraud scheme. According to Expressen, it is a network united by common family ties, criminal dealings and welfare crimes. Swedish police also detained several people with links to radical and violent extremism in an apartment in northern Stockholm. Expressen concluded that the two networks were involved in pure, large-scale outreach crime for significant sums.

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“Money disappears and does not fulfill its social purpose, while others get rich by seizing public funds,” Gothenburg Economic Crimes Authority Chief Prosecutor Henric Fagher told the Swedish news site.

Beyond disgust at large-scale fraud, concerns remain about terrorist recruitment and radicalization. In one known case, 30 ISIS fighters traveled from Gothenburg to Syria in 2013. According to The Guardian, 300 Swedes eventually joined jihadist groups, making Sweden second only to Belgium as a recruitment source. In 2023, 24 former ISIS fighters were found to be working as public employees in Sweden.

Americans have reason to worry. A year ago, 23-year-old Abdisatar Ahmed Hassan twice tried to leave Minnesota to join ISIS in the Islamic State in Somalia. He was arrested on September 29 and pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The known cases of ISIS radicalization, as well as multimillion-dollar welfare fraud, are downright scary. “There is no margin for error when it comes to terrorism,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said he said in a statement.

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Finally, the fraud schemes in Somalia are another reminder that overall U.S. refugee and asylum policy needs to be re-examined. It was a time when asylum policy reflected U.S. national interests, such as absorbing those fleeing the Soviet Union. Asylum policy remained adrift in the aftermath of the Cold War.

As stated in the new national security strategy, “who, in what number and from where a country will accept its borders will inevitably determine the future of that nation.”

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The tragic shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving should have been warning enough.

Accepting waves of refugees is not a sustainable policy.

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