The nonprofit Feeding Our Future claimed to have served 91 million meals to children across Minnesota. But as Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kline described in a recent court hearing, they were not feeding kids—they were instead “feeding the bank accounts of fraudsters.” FOF founder Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison for stealing close to $250 million in taxpayer dollars, orchestrating what the DOJ called the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.
Seventy-eight defendants and counting set up shell companies and phantom sites to feed nonexistent children. Former prosecutor Joe Thompson described the urgency of the FBI takedown: “I remember we took down the case on a Thursday because the following day, on a Friday, is when [the Minnesota Department of Education] paid out the money. Every Friday, they paid out about $20 million.” Twenty million dollars every Friday for meals the system never independently verified.
How exactly did a $4.1 billion federal program pay a quarter of a billion dollars for meals that were never served—and never notice?
Consider Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis. Before the pandemic, it pulled in roughly $600,000 a year. After enrolling in the Federal Child Nutrition Program through Feeding Our Future in April 2020, the restaurant claimed to serve 5,000 children per day by July, seven days a week. When the FBI placed cameras inside, actual visitors averaged around 40. The restaurant’s total take was a cool $12.1 million.
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