A resurfaced 2018 video from a Minneapolis-area TV station shows how Somali scammers allegedly bilked Minnesota out of millions of dollars for services that they never provided.
Independent journalist Nick Shirley touched off a storm on social media Friday after he posted a photo of one day care center, which displayed a banner calling it “The Greater Learing Center” on social media X, along with a 42-minute video that went viral showing him visiting that and other day care centers.
The 2018 surveillance video, which aired on KMSP-TV, with footage taken in 2015, showed parents taking kids into the center, then leaving with the same children minutes later, according to Fox News.
🚨 Video from a 2015 criminal case shows how parents were in on the childcare fraud scheme in Minnesota
The parents would check their kids into a daycare and leave with them a few minutes later. Sometimes no one would show up.
The daycares then gave kickbacks to parents pic.twitter.com/VblNGnV4bf
— Ryan Saavedra (@RyanSaavedra) December 30, 2025
“They were billing too much, they went up too high,” Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman told KMSP in 2018.
“It’s hard to imagine they were serving that many people. Frankly, if you’re going to cheat, cheat little, because if you cheat big, you’re going to get caught.”
Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was accused of engaging in “systemic” retaliation against whistleblowers in a Nov. 30 statement by state employees.
Assistant United States Attorney Joe Thompson announced on Dec. 18 that the amount of suspected fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid program had reached over $9 billion.
After Shirley’s video went viral over the weekend, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the agency was already sending additional resources in a Sunday post on X, citing the case surrounding Feeding Our Future, which at one point accused the Minnesota government of racism during litigation over the suspension of funds after earlier allegations of fraud.
CASE UPDATE: MINNESOTA FRAUD SCHEME
The FBI is aware of recent social media reports in Minnesota. However, even before the public conversation escalated online, the FBI had surged personnel and investigative resources to Minnesota to dismantle large-scale fraud schemes…
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) December 28, 2025
KSTP-TV reported that the Quality Learning Center, one of the centers visited by Shirley, had 95 citations for violations from one Minnesota agency between 2019 and 2023.
President Donald Trump announced in a Nov. 21 post on Truth Social that he would end “Temporary Protected Status” for Somalis in the state in response to allegations of welfare fraud and said that the influx of refugees had “destroyed our country.”
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