“Minnesota was just the tip of the spear,” Mehek Cooke, who is also a Republican strategist, recently told Fox News.
Cooke, who lives in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, said the scam there comes from a Medicaid program that pays as much as $91,000 annually to care for a sick family member at home. After learning about the program, Somali scammers have exploited it to get paid to take care of family members who don’t need medical care, she said, citing medical providers who have confided in her.
Cooke, who is now a political consultant, previously served as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Ohio.
AFN has reported how thousands of Somalis in Minnesota schemed and scammed to steal billions of dollars from government programs. More than 60 people have been charged for stealing from a nonprofit meal program for the poor, which laundered an eye-popping $250 million from 2018 to 2021. A second scam involved parents faking autism in their children to qualify for benefits from the Minnesota Health Care Program.
The staggering amount of fraud, which enriched numerous Somali ringleaders, also required kickbacks and accomplices to the fraud. The medical professionals in Ohio have also described bribes and kickbacks involving medical staff, too, Cooke said.
Ohio currently has the second-largest population of Somali-Americans, estimated to be as many as 60,000.
“The problem today is not the community,” the attorney told Fox News. “It's actually the criminals within the Somalian community that have exploited Ohio's Medicaid program because we have a system right now that's one of the easiest in the Midwest to game."
Cooke, who was born in India, immigrated legally to the U.S. as a child.
