The Justice Department on Thursday announced criminal charges against 15 defendants accused of stealing more than $90 million from Minnesota Medicaid and other taxpayer-funded social service programs in what officials described as the “largest autism fraud scheme” ever uncovered by the department, with links to existing fraud cases involving the Somali community.Federal prosecutors said the cases span seven separate Minnesota-managed Medicaid programs that were allegedly exploited through fake diagnoses, kickback schemes, fraudulent billing, and nonexistent care for vulnerable children and disabled adults. The indictment further exposed adjacent links to existing fraud cases involving members of Minnesota’s Somali community, including the large $250 million Feeding Our Future free meal delivery fraud case.“These defendants treated Minnesota-run programs as their personal piggy bank,” said Colin McDonald, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division. “The fraud here in Minnesota is shocking.”
One of the most prominent indictments announced Thursday involved two autism clinics, Smart Therapy in Minneapolis and Star Autism in St. Cloud. Prosecutors said two defendants, Shamso Ahmed Hassan and Hanaan Mursal Yusuf, fraudulently billed Medicaid more than $46 million for autism services that were either medically unnecessary or never provided. Notably, Hassan is married to Asha Farhan Hassan, who was charged in September 2025 with participating in a $14 million autism fraud scheme and has connections to the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, revealing a deeper layer of interconnectedness between the epidemic of criminal fraud schemes in the state than previously known.
