In one of the least surprising stories of criminality out of Minnesota, Abdiwahid Mohamed, a 60-year-old Minnesotan of Somali heritage who owns and runs a grocery store has been caught defrauding taxpayers to the tune of over a million dollars by using EBT food stamps to stock products in his store and sell them at a taxpayer-subsidized profit.
According to the criminal complaint and the reporting on it, Mohamed, whose company is named the Minnesota Food Grocery LLC, starting in 2021, managed to use over $1 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits obtained from others to buy up grocery goods from Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Costco. He then used those SNAP-obtained resources to stock his own shelves.
The criminal complaint against him provides that it was Walmart, rather than the state or federal authorities, who initially discovered the fraud, saying, “Wal-Mart discovered that a small group of people were making multiple purchases of products such as energy drinks and baby formula using EBT cards that did not belong to them.”
Continuing, the complaint described the scheme, noting that he would just drive the goods from stores like Walmart to his own store and stock the shelves with them, not even creating the pretense of using SNAP benefits and SNAP-bought goods as intended.
It said, describing as much, “Mohamed would then load the purchased goods into one of his two vehicles and deliver those goods directly to Minnesota Food Grocery, where he and his employees unloaded it.” The complaint also noted the overall amount of the fraud, saying, “Mohamed received $1,141,082 in EBT payments”.
Additionally, the complaint noted that, despite the seemingly amateurish nature of the scheme and Mohamed’s actions in it, in reality, the massive scheme “involved a high degree of sophistication or planning or occurred over a lengthy period of time.” Mohamed faces up to two decades of prison time if found guilty, with a $100,000 fine also being on the table.
Dalia al-Aqidi, a Republican running who is running against Rep. Ilhan Omar for Congress in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, commented on the fraud situation to Fox News, saying, “Minneapolis didn’t become America’s fraud capital by accident.”
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Continuing, he addressed the SNAP/EBT scandal directly, noting that the grocer used EBT to stock his shelves and that such incidents are far from being atypical in Minnesota, saying, “It was earned. This week, it’s a grocer charged with running up $1.1 million in charges on other people’s EBT cards. Next week, it will be something else, but the bill always lands on the Minnesotans who actually pay taxes.”
Commenting on the fraud more generally, he said, “It is just lining the wrong pockets and paying for luxury cars and houses on the other side of the world. The fraudsters are only half the story. The other half are the people administering these programs, from the front lines all the way up to Ilhan Omar, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Governor Tim Walz. There has been talk about ending fraud in Minnesota for years. I am going to Washington to actually do it.”
Watch local media report on the scandal here: