{"id":13199,"date":"2025-12-21T14:40:58","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T14:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=13199"},"modified":"2025-12-21T14:40:58","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T14:40:58","slug":"nearly-2000-minnesota-ghost-students-fraudulently-received-12-5-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=13199","title":{"rendered":"Nearly 2,000 Minnesota \u2018Ghost Students\u2019 Fraudulently Received $12.5 Million"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(THE FEDERALIST) \u2013 \u00a0In Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. and the site of numerous fraud investigations, fraudsters received $12.5 million in student loan and education grant money, according to a letter Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.\n<\/p>\n

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The\u00a0letter\u00a0calls on Walz to resign, and states that a new fraud prevention system at the department has found over $1 billion in \u201cattempted financial aid theft,\u201d including by international fraud rings and artificial intelligence (AI) bots.\n<\/p>\n

\u201c[Y]our careless lack of oversight and abuse of the welfare system has attracted fraudsters from around the world, especially from Somalia, to establish a beachhead of criminality in our country,\u201d McMahon wrote. \u201cAs President Trump put it, you have turned Minnesota into a \u2018fraudulent hub of money laundering activity.\u2019\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the beginning of this year, the U.S. Department of Education became aware that fraudulent college applicants, especially concentrated in Minnesota, were gaming the federal postsecondary education system to collect money that was intended for young Americans to help them afford college,\u201d she said.\n<\/p>\n

McMahon referred to the fraudsters as \u201c\u2018ghost students\u2019 because they were not ID-verified and often did not live in the United States, or they simply did not exist,\u201d and noted that, \u201c[i]n Minnesota, 1,834 ghost students were found to have received 12.5 million in taxpayer-funded grants and loans.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

They \u201ccollected checks from the federal government, shared a small portion of the money with the college, and pocketed the rest\u2013without attending the college at all,\u201d according to the letter.\n<\/p>\n

The letter comes after Somalis in Minnesota, in particular, have been\u00a0exposed\u00a0as having massively defrauded American taxpayers. They have even\u00a0reportedly funded\u00a0terrorists back in their country.\n<\/p>\n

The news surrounding Somali fraud includes allegations of multiple\u00a0scams, including claims that an autism \u201cprovider\u201d\u00a0enrolled\u00a0Somali children who did not have an autism diagnosis in a welfare fraud scheme.\n<\/p>\n

The outrage, among many other cultural problems with Somalis, has resulted in President Donald Trump intending to\u00a0cancel\u00a0some Somalis\u2019 temporary protected status.\n<\/p>\n

Trump recently\u00a0pointed out\u00a0that Somalis \u201ccontribute nothing\u201d to American society. \u201cI don\u2019t want them in our country. I\u2019ll be honest with you,\u201d he said, noting Somalia is \u201cbarely a country\u201d where \u201cthey just run around killing each other.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

While it should be utterly shocking to every American that government systems apparently don\u2019t have basic safeguards to make sure that fraud like this is impossible, it is unsurprising that a culture defined by scam artists is finding every way to cash out. Just look at Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who allegedly\u00a0married her brother\u00a0(which would likely constitute marriage, immigration, and tax\u00a0fraud) in order to enter the United States.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cScammers have gotten rich off federal housing, education, food stamp, and small business programs\u2013even defrauding assistance for elder care and autistic children,\u201d McMahon said in Tuesday\u2019s letter. \u201cJoining these criminals in their schemes have been Minnesota politicians who benefit\u2013both in votes and donations\u2013from fraudsters\u2019 support. Like the radical Islamic terror groups overseas who receive Minnesota money to kill American servicemembers, Minnesota\u2019s political elite has turned a blind eye and even helped facilitate the laundering of money that was meant to help America\u2019s least fortunate.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

In June, the Department of Education announced a \u201cnationwide effort to eliminate identity theft and fraud in the federal student aid programs for the fall 2025 semester,\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0a requirement for institutions of higher education to verify \u201ccertain first-time applicants who are enrolled in the summer term,\u201d as an immediate effort to combat fraud.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cFederal Student Aid (FSA) data indicates that the rate of fraud through stolen identities, particularly involving technologically advanced fraud rings, has reached a level that imperils the federal student assistance programs,\u201d the department stated at the time.\n<\/p>\n

Another obvious\u00a0safeguard, also announced by the Education Department in June, required\u00a0first-time student aid applicants\u00a0to \u201cpresent, either in person or on a live video conference, an unexpired, valid, government-issued photo identification to an institutionally authorized individual and the institution must preserve a copy of this documentation.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

As the department has\u00a0noted, the Biden administration removed verification capabilities for student loans and \u201cdiverted resources from fraud prevention toward its illegal loan forgiveness efforts,\u201d opening the door for\u00a0massive fraud.\n<\/p>\n

How are you praying for our government? Share your prayers and scriptures below.<\/h4>\n

This article was originally published in The Federalist.<\/em>
\n \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: 3 minutes (THE FEDERALIST) \u2013 \u00a0In Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. and the site of numerous fraud investigations, fraudsters received $12.5 million in student loan and education grant money, according to a letter Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Become a Monthly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[3767,3595,208,3009,2609,1073],"class_list":{"0":"post-13199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-prayer","8":"tag-fraudulently","9":"tag-ghost","10":"tag-million","11":"tag-minnesota","12":"tag-received","13":"tag-students"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}