FBI Arrests Four in $41 Million Minnesota Medicaid Scheme. Oz: Nearly 1 in 3 High-Risk Providers Weren't Eligible

The Trump administration brought its war on fraud straight to Minnesota on Friday, and it came with handcuffs. Standing in St. Cloud, FBI Director Kash Patel said agents served 17 search warrants in a single day on Thursday, rolled the evidence into a 26-count indictment and arrested four people accused of trying to take Medicaid for more than $41 million.

Then CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz dropped the number that explains how it got this bad. When Washington made Minnesota recheck its high-risk Medicaid providers, he said, roughly one in three of them turned out not to be allowed to provide services at all.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, who runs DOJ's fraud division, joined them for what the White House billed as a Vice President's Fraud Task Force event. Here's everything that was announced, and the parts the quick headlines left out.

The arrests

Patel read the four names and companies from the podium. Three of the warrants hit a child care center, two hit the homes of the centers' owners and two targeted Minnesota's autism therapy program, known by its initials EIDBI (Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention), he said.

- Feisal Elmi, Aspen Associates: 11 counts of health care fraud, $8 million in intended loss.

- Jama Mohamod, American Home Health Care: health care fraud, $3.27 million in intended loss.

- Faiza Ahmed, Home Sweet Home: health care fraud, $10 million in intended fraud.

- Habiba Mohamed, Smart Therapy: one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which Patel put at nearly $20 million.

"The subjects intended to defraud thousands of victims of over $41 million, money that was supposed to go to those in need, with our precious taxpayer dollars funding that bill," Patel said. In his own post, he put actual losses at $21.65 million. All four are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The one-way ticket. One detail never made it to the podium. Bill Glahn of the Center of the American Experiment, who sat in federal court in Minneapolis on Thursday, reported that Elmi spent his first appearance trying to keep his plans to fly to the United Kingdom on a one-way ticket, saying his family had recently moved to Britain. It came out in court that he had earlier wired $500,000 overseas and owns real estate in Africa, Glahn wrote. A separate hearing on that trip was set for Friday morning.

Thursday's sweep wasn't only federal. Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison's own Medicaid Fraud Control Unit says its agents searched two more autism centers, Iska, Inc. in St. Louis Park and Bright Horizon Therapy Center in Edina, alongside the FBI and federal health investigators. No charges have been filed in those two cases.

Oz: one in three couldn't pass the check

Oz explained the fix the administration forced on the state: revalidation, which simply asks whether a provider is really allowed to do the work it bills for. To pass, he said, you can't be a convicted felon, you have to be licensed in Minnesota to own the business, you have to pass inspections, and you can't have been kicked out of Medicare or Medicaid before.

Minnesota was told to revalidate all of its high-risk providers across 14 categories. "One in three people, roughly, who were providing services were not allowed to provide services," Oz said. A failure that big, he said, means "you have to purposely be averting your glance to allow that to happen."

He said it was worse in one corner of the program: 50% of the people in Minnesota's social adult day care weren't allowed to provide that service. Think of it like a restaurant inspection that finds a third of the kitchens never had a license. That's not a few bad cooks. That's nobody checking the door.

The White House didn't soften who it blames. Its Rapid Response account posted Oz's remarks with a line saying Democrats like Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan "let them get away with it."

Treasury follows the money: $8 billion in red flags

Bessent's department brought the biggest number of the day. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, issued a new alert saying that through bank reports it has identified more than $8 billion in suspicious payments between 2021 and 2025 that U.S. money transfer companies sent at the direction of their foreign agents.

Here's how it works, in plain terms. A U.S. money transmitter partners with agents overseas who pay out the money on the other end. FinCEN says some of those foreign agents are telling the U.S. company to wire money not to themselves but to unrelated third parties, such as trading companies with no web presence, newly created companies, or a textile firm, often in round-dollar amounts and within hours or days. The foreign agent ends up using the American company's bank account as its own, and the bank can't see who is really getting paid or why.

The alert names where the money goes: foreign exchange houses in the United Arab Emirates, Chinese commercial banks and trading companies, Egypt, and East African countries including Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti. FinCEN said it has found cases where the funds ultimately benefited entities with identified connections to terrorist financing.

Two honest caveats from the alert itself. First, the $8 billion is a nationwide figure, not a Minnesota total. Second, FinCEN stresses that a suspicious activity report is a tip, not proof, and that the total can count the same money more than once. That is exactly why it is asking banks to dig in, tag new reports with the key term "FIN2026FOREIGNAGENT" and send them in.

FinCEN also issued a second notice on charities and nonprofits, warning banks about three kinds of abuse: sham charities that funnel money to illicit activity, including terrorism; fake-purpose charities that pay for the operators' lifestyles; and insiders who embezzle from real ones. It points straight back to Minnesota, citing the Feeding Our Future case, in which nonprofits acted as "sponsors" for fraudulent third parties and collected government fees and kickbacks.

Paying people to blow the whistle

Bessent also announced money for tipsters. "Treasury is proud to seed this new $25 million fraud whistleblower incentive program," he said. "Anyone who submits information that leads to a conviction or enforcement action may be eligible for a $30,000 reward. Speaking up has long carried a cost for whistleblowers. Under [President Trump], it can offer a reward." The White House points tipsters to America.gov/fraud.

He added that Treasury returned $175 million in payments over the past year that would have gone to dead people, stopped almost $190 million tied to overseas fraud and returned more than $100 million to American victims.

The scoreboard

This didn't start Friday. Patel said the Feeding Our Future investigation alone has now charged 81 people, convicted 70 and won more than $533 million in combined restitution. This week a Feeding Our Future co-conspirator, Salim Said, owner of Safari Restaurant, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for his part in a $49 million scheme against the federal child nutrition program, Treasury said.

McDonald said five defendants were charged with Medicaid fraud this week alone, in schemes with more than $48 million in intended loss. "Over roughly the past 115 days, 14 fraud defendants in Minnesota have been sentenced to a combined total of 988 months in prison," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, that is the new normal, and fraudsters here should know it." That's more than 82 years of prison time.

What happens next

More cases are coming. The two autism centers Ellison's unit searched haven't been charged yet, Elmi faces a hearing over his travel plans, and FinCEN's alert means every bank and money transmitter in America is now on notice to flag foreign-agent wires that don't add up.

For years, Minnesota's programs paid first and asked questions never. Friday's message from Washington was simple: the questions have started, and the answers are landing people in prison.