Category: Crime

Allegations that more than $100 million slipped out of Minnesota’s safety net programs are not about a single scam or a lone bad actor. They reveal a pattern of weak oversight, rapid program expansion, and opportunists who learned to treat public aid as a cash machine. I see a story that stretches from pandemic food…

Federal investigators say they were able to create fake Obamacare customers, sign them up for coverage, and quietly collect an average of $2,350 a month in taxpayer-funded subsidies, all without providing the documentation the law requires. The findings point to deep cracks in how the Affordable Care Act marketplace verifies identity and income, and they…

Bank scammers have learned that the fastest way into your account is not through malware or data breaches but through your phone, by convincing you to move the money yourself. The single most effective move I see ordinary people overlook is turning on aggressive call screening so unknown numbers are filtered, flagged or silenced before…

Federal investigators say Minnesota has become a testing ground for “industrial-scale” fraud that siphoned public money away from children, low income families, and people with disabilities. What began as a nutrition scandal has widened into overlapping probes of child care, Medicaid and other social services, triggering funding freezes, political showdowns and questions about whether the…

Ilhan Omar’s rapid ascent from a relatively modest public servant to a figure reportedly worth about $30 million has become a political flashpoint in Minnesota and beyond. The scale of that increase, framed by critics as a roughly 3,500 percent jump in personal wealth, is now colliding with a widening fraud probe that is reshaping…

Government investigators created bogus Affordable Care Act customers and watched the money roll in, collecting $2,350 a month in subsidies on fake Obamacare accounts that were never supposed to exist. The findings land in the middle of a long‑running fight over “waste, fraud and abuse” in health programs, and they confirm what many policy hands…

The alleged diversion of roughly $250 million from a federal kids-meal program in Minnesota is more than a spectacular white-collar crime story. It is a case study in how emergency COVID money, weak oversight, and opportunistic middlemen can collide to leave real children hungry while adults cash in. As the “Feeding Our Future” scandal moves…

Federal investigators say they created fake Obamacare customers and watched as the government sent them an average of $2,350 a month in premium help, a vivid illustration of how easily the Affordable Care Act’s subsidy system can be gamed. The same watchdog is now warning that those test cases sit on top of a much…

The latest interception of a Venezuelan-linked supertanker bound for China has turned a simmering sanctions campaign into a full-blown maritime confrontation. The US Coast Guard again moved in international waters near Venezuela to halt a cargo of crude, extending President Donald Trump’s naval blockade on sanctioned oil shipments and drawing sharp protests from Caracas and…

A truckload of live lobster worth $400,000 vanished somewhere between a New England loading dock and a cluster of Midwest warehouse stores, turning a routine Costco delivery into a federal crime story. The missing seafood was supposed to be chilled, aerated, and stacked in crates for shoppers in Illinois and Minnesota, not quietly siphoned off…