Vance's Fraud Task Force Charges 40+ People in $42 Million Food Stamp Theft, Including a Rapper Who Flaunted Private Jets

Vice President JD Vance stood at the FBI's Cincinnati field office Wednesday and announced that his fraud task force has caught nearly $42 million being stolen from the federal food stamp program in just seven weeks. More than 40 people have been charged, pleaded guilty or been sentenced since Sept. 1 in what the Justice Department called its first nationwide surge against fraud in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and other Agriculture Department programs, according to the department's announcement.

"Two-hundred twenty thousand Americans could've eaten for the entire month of October if it were not for this $42 million in fraud," Attorney General Todd Blanche said, the New York Post reported. "We've indicted men and women in 13 different districts just in the past seven weeks, and that effort will continue for as long as it takes."

The face of the crackdown is an Atlanta rapper and influencer who calls himself Shawty Dred. Prosecutors say he ran up $4.4 million in stolen benefits while posting private jets, Rolls-Royces and stacks of cash for his more than 2 million Instagram followers, the Post reported.

The rapper and the 9,000 phone calls

Mercedes New, 39, was indicted Oct. 7 in federal court in Atlanta on charges of food stamp fraud, mail fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft, the Justice Department said. Georgia's welfare investigators noticed in 2025 that someone was hammering the automated phone line SNAP recipients use to check their cards. Phone numbers tied to New called it more than 9,000 times and got into more than 350 separate SNAP accounts.

Investigators say about $635,000 of the transactions ran through Shawty Dred LLC, a store New owned that had been approved to take SNAP. In November 2025, police in East Point, Ga., arrested him outside a Walmart for trying to sell EBT cards to shoppers and seized 14 of them. In all, more than 500 Georgia EBT cards are linked to him. He was arrested Oct. 13 in Las Vegas, the department said.

Prosecutors say he created the accounts with stolen identities and had the cards mailed to addresses around metro Atlanta, then sold them for cash or rang them up at his own store. Along the way he taunted his viewers in profanity-laced posts as "broke," the Post reported.

Vance put it plainly. "This is a man that we have connected to $4.4 million in fraud against the SNAP program. A guy who is quite literally taking food from the mouths of children so that he can enrich himself," he said, in remarks his office posted. "SNAP exists to help hungry children eat. It does not exist to provide private jets to a guy like Shawty Dred." He added that the rapper's own Instagram videos helped investigators connect the stolen money to the private jet seats, the Post reported.

The biggest case: $29.7 million through two Chicago stores

The rapper is the colorful one. The biggest dollar figure belongs to Jorag Yaseen and Rami Kanaan, who ran SNAP-approved food stores in Chicago. A federal grand jury in Ohio indicted them on charges that from about February 2024 to April 2025 they and others processed thousands of transactions using stolen EBT card information from Ohio and other states, the Justice Department said. The sales looked like ordinary grocery purchases. No food changed hands.

The scheme caused an estimated $29.7 million loss to the United States, and some of the money bought cars for use and for shipment overseas, prosecutors allege. Yaseen and Kanaan face charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, Cincinnati's Fox 19 reported.

Think of it as a cash register wired straight into the Treasury. Every fake swipe of a stolen card told Ohio to pay the store, and the families who owned those cards found out only when their balance hit zero.

Baby formula, marijuana and stolen identities

The rest of the list reads like a tour of every way to rob the program, according to the Justice Department:

In Oregon, the leader of a crew that hauled infant formula bought with stolen benefits across the country was sentenced Sept. 9 to 27 months in prison. Members of the theft crew, most of them Romanian nationals in the country illegally, skimmed card data and bought formula in bulk. More than 124,000 pounds of it was shipped for resale on the black market.

In Euclid, Ohio, six people, including three citizens of Yemen, were charged with trading SNAP benefits for cash, marijuana and other forbidden items at a gas station convenience store, in a conspiracy that took more than $1 million.

In Lansing, Mich., store owner Mohinder Singh was indicted on charges that he paid customers 50 cents in cash for every $1 in benefits and let them pay off debts with SNAP, prosecutors there said.

In eastern Michigan, a pair used the names and personal information of more than 650 people to file hundreds of fake SNAP applications. One pleaded guilty and the other was sentenced to 18 months.

In Massachusetts, Dominican national Rodolfo Armando Fernandez Guzman is accused of stealing an American's identity to collect more than $22,000 in SNAP, about $98,000 in MassHealth and more than $45,000 in Section 8 housing benefits, and of racking up two felony convictions in Arizona under the victim's name.

Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, who runs the department's National Fraud Enforcement Division, said the Massachusetts suspect "is suspected to be unlawfully in the United States." "This is one of the many cases charged this year involving suspected illegal aliens stealing the identities of Americans to then steal from America," he said, the Post reported.

ICE goes after the benefit thieves, too

The same day, the Department of Homeland Security announced an operation aimed at illegal aliens who collect SNAP benefits they are barred by federal law from receiving, Fox News reported. ICE has arrested five so far: Cuban national Elizabeth Povea Rodriguez and Haitian nationals Rubstony Junior Theodore, Wilbert Jean Baptiste, Louis Jean and Jhensly Charles, DHS said. The department said Povea Rodriguez has a disorderly conduct conviction and arrests for battery and domestic violence, and Theodore has arrests for larceny, obstruction of officers and trespassing.

"Illegal aliens who have no right to be here in the first place are the last people who should be using SNAP benefits and other forms of welfare," said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. "These programs are for Americans only." He called the people already arrested and deported "just a drop in the bucket." DHS called the arrests "the opening salvo in a sustained, large-scale ICE operation," according to its statement.

Who really pays

Every dollar stolen comes out of the same pot that feeds struggling families. Officials described one victim, a mother who learned her benefits were gone only when her card was declined at the grocery store. She had to take out loans to feed her children, the Justice Department said. "She's not only humiliated in front of her children, but she doesn't have a way to put food on the table that night because of these fraudsters," Blanche said, WKRC reported.

"Every instance of SNAP fraud has two victims: families in dire need and taxpayers," Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. "Under the Trump Administration, food stamp fraud ends now." USDA Inspector General John Walk said the stolen money also goes "to line the pockets of fraudsters and bankroll other criminal activities like guns and drugs that make American communities less safe," the department said.

The $42 million is a drop next to how loosely the program is run. States paid out $10.1 billion in improper SNAP benefits in fiscal 2025, a 10.62% error rate that is far above the 6% limit Congress set, the Agriculture Department reported in June. Georgia, where the rapper allegedly worked his scheme, came in at 15.21%, and Illinois, home of the Chicago stores, at 14.67%, USDA's state tables show. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1), states at or above 6% will have to cover 5% to 15% of their own benefit costs, in most cases starting as soon as Oct. 1, 2027.

What comes next

The surge was run by the Justice Department's new Fraud Division, created April 7, alongside 13 U.S. attorney's offices and the Utah attorney general, and it supports President Trump's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which Vance chairs, the department said. It follows the administration's new program that pays whistleblowers who report fraud.

Vance and Blanche also want Congress to raise the penalties for fraud so fewer people try it in the first place, Fox 19 reported. "This surge is only the beginning," Walk said. In seven weeks, investigators found enough stolen food money to feed 220,000 Americans for a month. The officials on that Cincinnati stage say they are just getting started.