Ryan Thorpe

and acknowledge the problem before we can seek to solve it.

So there's a risk on both sides, I feel like.

I agree entirely with what you're saying.

And look, from the law enforcement side of things that counterterrorism people have spoken to, they basically said, like, look, we're playing whack-a-mole over here with these fraud rings.

It's like, yeah, we can whack them down.

We can try and dismantle them.

There is definitely a role for law enforcement to play here.

But we need to figure out something on the policy side of things to stop, like, you know, we got to turn off the taps.

Yeah.

And when it comes to that, I mean, the only way for that to really happen will be some kind of political reckoning, I would think.

Ultimately, Minnesotan voters are going to have to decide at the ballot box what they're going to do and whether or not they trust the same people that were in government overseeing this to be the ones to fix it.

But there's going to have to be a political solution here at some point because what they've been doing at the state level there is clearly not working.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that's a fair perspective.

You know, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Yeah, so what you would see, and this is what should have been setting off alarm bells for state officials, was you saw a rapid expansion in these particular programs.

So there's one program that was targeted.

It was called their Housing Stabilization Services Program.

It was seeking to help people who were disabled, mentally ill, struggling with addiction, having

help them get into stable housing.

What the fraudsters were doing in this particular case is they were setting up totally fictitious companies that were operating out of dilapidated storefronts and rundown office buildings.