In Minnesota, a state with the largest Somali immigrant populations in the United States, extensive welfare fraud schemes have siphoned billions of taxpayer dollars from federal and state programs, primarily orchestrated by members of the Somali community. The most notorious case, Feeding Our Future, involved fake nonprofits submitting bogus meal claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, defrauding over $250 million in child nutrition funds.

Similar scams have targeted Medicaid's autism services, where providers inflated diagnoses among Somali children, jumping from $3 million in spending in 2018 to $399 million in 2023. While housing stabilization programs, created fictitious companies to bill for nonexistent services. Federal prosecutors, led by Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, have issued 77 indictments in the Feeding Our Future case alone, with additional charges in autism and welfare fraud totaling at least 28 scandals since 2019, amounting to an estimated $1 billion in losses.

These frauds extend beyond mere theft, with investigations revealing that millions of the stolen funds were funneled back to Somalia through informal hawala networks, ultimately supporting the al-Qaeda linked terrorist group Al-Shabaab.