Federal agents arrested two Minnesota women on May 21 for allegedly running a four-year scheme that bilked Medicaid out of more than $21 million through sham autism care centers, a case that adds to a growing pattern of massive fraud originating in the state.
Shamso Ahmed Hassan and Hanaan Mursal Yusuf face federal charges after a joint FBI and Homeland Security Investigations probe found they allegedly submitted false claims to Minnesota's Medicaid system, paid parents monthly kickbacks to enroll their children, and funneled some of the stolen money overseas to Kenya. Both remain in federal custody.
The Department of Homeland Security announced the arrests in a press release issued May 27, detailing how the defendants allegedly exploited a state program designed to help children with autism, the Minnesota Early Intensive Development and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) Program, and turned it into a cash machine.
Hassan owned two companies at the center of the alleged fraud: Smart Therapy Center LLC and Star Autism Center LLC. She enrolled as a provider of EIDBI services and served as the lead biller for Smart Therapy Center, giving her direct control over the claims submitted to Medicaid.
The indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota lays out a scheme that ran from May 2020 through December 2024. DHS stated:
"Through both companies, the defendants carried out a scheme to defraud a health care benefit program of approximately $21.1 million by submitting false and fraudulent claims to Medicaid. This scheme took place over the course of more than four years, from May of 2020 to December of 2024."
The kickback structure was brazen. The defendants allegedly paid parents between $300 and $1,500 per month to have their Medicaid-eligible children receive EIDBI services at the defendants' facilities. But they didn't write checks directly to the parents.
Instead, the indictment alleges, they laundered the payments through family members and employees, writing checks to those intermediaries, who cashed them and handed the money to parents. They even had a code word for the illegal payments: "computer."
Some of the proceeds allegedly made their way out of the country entirely. The indictment states that Hassan and Yusuf transferred funds "overseas, including to Kenya."
DHS confirmed that both women are U.S. citizens. Hassan is a naturalized citizen. Both were ordered held in federal custody pending judicial proceedings, a signal that prosecutors may have argued they posed a flight risk or danger, though the specific arguments made at their initial appearances are not detailed in the available filings.
The indictment references unnamed co-conspirators, but no additional arrests have been announced. The exact federal charges beyond the general fraud allegations have not been publicly specified in the DHS announcement.
The FBI led the investigation with HSI assistance, a combination of agencies that typically signals suspected fraud with cross-border financial dimensions, consistent with the allegation that funds were sent to Kenya.
This case lands in a state already reeling from one of the largest pandemic-era fraud schemes in American history. On the same day Hassan and Yusuf were arrested, May 21, Feeding Our Future ringleader Aimee Bock received a 41.5-year prison sentence for stealing approximately $250 million in federal funds meant to feed children during the pandemic.
The Feeding Our Future scandal exposed systemic failures in how Minnesota administered federal aid. Defendants in that case used nonprofit meal programs as fronts, submitted fraudulent claims, and spent the money on luxury cars, real estate, and overseas investments.
The parallels to the new Medicaid case are hard to miss. Both schemes exploited programs designed to help vulnerable children. Both allegedly involved falsified claims submitted to government benefit systems. Both allegedly moved money offshore. And both emerged from the same state.
The Feeding Our Future case also drew political attention. The fraud scheme's central figure claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar knew about the $250 million operation, an allegation that has generated sustained scrutiny of the congresswoman's circle.
Omar has denied knowledge of the fraud. But the questions have not gone away. Separately, a Treasury anti-terror agency reportedly froze funds tied to Omar's husband, according to a business partner's claims, another thread in a web of financial investigations touching Minnesota's Somali-American community leadership.
Efforts to investigate these connections at the state level have met resistance. Minnesota Democrats blocked a subpoena of Omar over Feeding Our Future fraud records, a move that critics said shielded a sitting member of Congress from legitimate legislative oversight.
The scale of fraud flowing through Minnesota's benefit programs raises questions that go beyond any single defendant. How did $21.1 million in allegedly false Medicaid claims go undetected for more than four years? What controls exist within the EIDBI Program to verify that services billed to taxpayers were actually provided? And why does Minnesota keep producing these cases at a rate that no other state matches?
The kickback structure alleged in the Hassan-Yusuf indictment is not sophisticated financial engineering. It is checks written to intermediaries, cashed, and handed to parents, with a code word that sounds like something out of a middle-school scheme. If the allegations are true, the fraud persisted not because it was clever but because no one was checking.
That is the real indictment, not just of two defendants, but of the oversight systems that are supposed to protect taxpayer dollars and the children these programs exist to serve. Medicaid fraud is not a victimless crime. Every dollar stolen from autism care programs is a dollar that didn't reach a child who needed it.
DHS described Hassan's role in detail in its press release:
"Hassan was a beneficial owner of Smart Therapy Center LLC and Star Autism Center LLC. She had enrolled as a provider of services for the Minnesota Early Intensive Development and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) Program, and was an employee and lead biller for Smart Therapy Center LLC, responsible for submitting claims to Medicaid."
In other words, the person allegedly submitting the false claims was the same person who controlled the billing. That is not a gap in the system. It is the absence of a system.
Federal law enforcement deserves credit for building this case and making arrests. The FBI-HSI partnership produced results. But the arrests came in 2026 for a scheme that allegedly began in 2020. Four and a half years of alleged fraud, totaling $21.1 million, before anyone was taken into custody.
Minnesota's political leadership has spent years deflecting questions about why the state became a magnet for benefit fraud. Omar has denied knowledge of the $250 million meals fraud even as a DOJ probe loomed, and state officials have largely treated each new case as an isolated incident rather than evidence of a structural problem.
Hassan and Yusuf now face the federal justice system. Their cases will proceed through the U.S. District Court in Minnesota. The indictment's reference to unnamed co-conspirators suggests the investigation may not be finished.
For Minnesota taxpayers, and for every American whose federal tax dollars fund Medicaid, the question is straightforward. When a state's benefit programs keep getting looted for tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, at some point the problem is not just the people committing the fraud. It is the people who kept the door open.
