Ryan Thorpe

They primarily targeted people who were exiting drug and rehab facilities.

They would sign them up for Medicaid services that they had no intention of ever providing, and then they would bill for this funding and completely pocket it.

That was similar to some of these other schemes where one centered on providing meals to hungry children.

It's just like there were no children and there were no meals.

The autism services that have been defrauded, these were...

Let's get fake autism diagnosis for children and then let's sign them up for autism therapy services and then we'll give the parents a bit of a kickback.

And the situation got so out of control that autism diagnoses in the Somali community were triple the state average.

You know, the number of providers were just skyrocketing and the amount of money was too.

So at least, you know, those kind of big ticket fraud rings today, that's kind of what was going on in terms of the nuts and bolts of it.

Well, I mean, fraud, like the leaders of the fraud rings, they themselves have been arrested.

There are certainly going to be more arrests to come.

There is also, I think I should point out, you know, a group of whistleblowers within DHS in Minnesota who have been attempting to raise alarm bells about this for quite some time.

And they're basically pointing the figure, you know, at the politician saying that like, hey,

The bureaucrats that were in state government, many of us did recognize that alarm bells were going off and did try to blow the whistle about what's been going on in terms of the fraud.

But the response from the politicians was just to turn a blind eye.

So there was some people that noticed, but for whatever reason, the proper steps weren't taken to put an end to it.

Now, we can all speculate as to why that might be, but I do think that's the next leg of this story is looking at the lack of action from the government in Minnesota.

Well, thank you, Mike.

And yeah, I'd love to come back on sometime.