Top Trump administration officials descended on Minnesota on Friday with a stack of new anti-fraud actions, headlined by a Treasury finding that U.S. financial institutions reported more than $8 billion in potentially suspicious wire payments sent through U.S.-based money services businesses at the direction of foreign agents between 2021 and 2025.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson held a news conference in St. Cloud to lay out the latest moves by the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.
“When greed meets negligence, the American people suffer,” Bessent said. “Under President Trump and Vice President Vance’s leadership, Treasury stopped nearly $190 million in funds tied to overseas fraud and returned more than $100 million to U.S. victims. We are working with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud to help prevent this kind of abuse from happening again, in Minnesota or anywhere else.”
Search warrants and arrests
Bessent and Patel announced that federal agents executed 17 search warrants in Minneapolis this week, resulting in four arrests tied to millions of dollars in allegedly fraudulent funds, according to Just the News. Several of the warrants were linked to child care facilities and their owners.
Fraudulent daycare centers became one of the most prominent issues in the state after viral reporting by YouTuber Nick Shirley documented a string of allegedly fraudulent child care centers in Minneapolis.
New warnings for banks and nonprofits
Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an alert asking financial institutions to watch for suspicious activity involving certain cross-border payments through U.S. money services businesses. According to Treasury, bad actors can exploit those relationships to move money through the U.S. financial system while hiding who ultimately gets it and why, structures that can help conceal illicit activity such as funding for terrorist organizations.
FinCEN also issued a separate notice to help banks detect fraud that exploits charities and nonprofit organizations, urging them to scrutinize donors, funding streams and ties to other groups and governments. The notice describes three forms of abuse: sham charities diverting money to illicit activity, charity-related fraud that enriches the people running a scheme, and embezzlement by insiders at legitimate organizations.
Feeding Our Future sentence
The announcement came the same week Salim Said, a co-conspirator in the Feeding Our Future scheme, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Said, owner of Safari Restaurant, was convicted at trial on 21 counts including wire fraud, money laundering, bribery and conspiracy for his role in defrauding a federal child nutrition program of $49 million.
Bessent said that since January 2025 the administration has identified a total of $260 billion in fraud and is preventing as much as $70 billion a year from going to fraudulent recipients, according to Just the News. He also highlighted a $25 million fraud whistleblower fund.
The Minnesota stop comes just days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, as the administration keeps its war on fraud front and center.