Prosecutors have now secured more than 50 convictions in the Feeding Our Future case as three more guilty pleas were announced Monday.
“This milestone marks an extraordinary achievement by our team and our law enforcement partners,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson.
“For years, these elite federal agents and forensic accountants have tracked stolen money, cut through layers of deceit, and exposed a sprawling network of shell companies and fake meal claims. Their pursuit of justice has been relentless. Because of their work, we’ve uncovered not just one scheme, but a far-reaching fraud crisis that’s swamping Minnesota. This is public service at its finest. And this team is nowhere near finished,” he continued.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a since-dissolved nonprofit called Feeding Our Future ran a scheme that defrauded a federal child nutrition program of roughly $250 million. In short, the nonprofit partnered with vendors to fraudulently claim that they were providing meals to hungry children. The federal government issued reimbursements for those claims.
In many cases, vendors claimed they provided meals to children in numbers that were not mathematically possible.
Since the initial indictments in the Feeding Our Future scheme were handed down in 2022, more than 70 individuals have been charged for their alleged involvement in the scheme. The former leader of Feeding Our Future, Aimee Bock, was found guilty for her role in the operation earlier this year.
The latest guilty pleas were entered by Mahad Ibrahim, 46, Hamdi Hussein Omar, 29, and Hibo Salah Daar, 51.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office:
Ibrahim took deliberate steps to avoid learning the full scale of his conspirators’ activities, which spanned dozens of program sites across the state.
However, he allowed a nonprofit he operated called ThinkTechAct Foundation to be used in furtherance of the scheme and received substantial payouts from his conspirators in exchange. He used another entity to launder the proceeds and purchase real estate in Ohio.
Omar participated in the scheme with several conspirators, including Salim Said, who was charged in the same indictment and was convicted after trial earlier this year.
Omar’s conspirators created a fake food distribution site in Waite Park, at a small market in a strip mall.
Omar knew and allowed her conspirators to use her name as the supposed operator of that site. Those conspirators then began claiming, falsely, to serve about 2,000 meals to children from that site every day of the week.
In all, over a matter of months, they claimed to serve half a million meals from that small, Waite Park market. To further the scheme, Omar created a company called Feeding Our Youth, which she falsely held out as the food vendor for the Waite Park site. She and her conspirators also supported their program reimbursement claims with phony attendance rosters purporting to document the children they fed. Those rosters listed made-up children with fake ages. In all, Omar and her conspirators caused a taxpayer loss of $1.4 million.
Daar participated in the Feeding Our Future scheme through an entity she controlled called Northside Wellness Center Corporation. In November 2020, Daar enrolled Northside Wellness in the federal child nutrition program as a food-distribution site under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future.
Daar and her conspirators then used Northside Wellness to defraud the program and steal taxpayer dollars. Northside Wellness claimed to serve 52,000 meals to children in the month of January 2021 and then, just two months later, claimed to be serving 40,000 meals to children every week. Those claims were false.
Daar and her conspirators supported those meal counts with phony invoices, and Daar authorized payment of $72,000 in bribes to a Feeding Our Future employee to keep the scheme running. In all, the Northside Wellness claims caused $2.4 million in taxpayer losses.
Ibrahim pleaded guilty on July 24 to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. Omar and Daar pleaded guilty on Aug. 1 to one count of wire fraud each.
