Minneapolis Man Pleads Guilty in $250 Million Feeding Our Future Fraud Scheme

MINNEAPOLIS – A Minneapolis man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud for his role in the $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick.

According to court documents, from April 2020 through January 2022, Abdikadir Ainashe Mohamud, a.k.a. “AK,” 33, claimed to be operating a child nutrition site in Willmar, Minnesota, a small town with a total population of approximately 21,000. Mohamud ran his food site, Stigma-Free Willmar, under the sponsorship of Feeding our Future. In October 2020, Mohamud approached the owner of FaaFan restaurant and offered to pay him monthly so that he could claim the small storefront restaurant as a Stigma-Free Willmar food site. By October 20, 2020, less than a month after registering the Stigma-Free Willmar site, Mohamud claimed to be serving meals to 3,000 children per day, seven days a week from FaaFan. Mohamud created a shell company, Tunyar Trading, and claimed it was a meal vendor for the Stigma-Free Willmar food site. Between November 2020 and December 2021, Mohamud and his co-conspirators claimed to have served approximately 1.6 million meals to children through Stigma-Free Willmar.

To accomplish their scheme, Mohamud and his co-conspirators prepared and submitted fake meal counts, invoices, and attendance rosters. Mohamud ultimately transferred more than $2.5 million from Tunyar Trading to himself and other co-conspirators. He also created another shell company called Five A’s Projects LLC, where he transferred more than $1 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds. These proceeds were used to purchase the former location of Kelly’s 19th Hole, a bar and restaurant in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

According to court documents, Mohamud paid more than $225,000 in bribes and kickbacks from Tunyar Trading LLC to Abdikerm Eidleh, a Feeding Our Future employee who served as the site support manager for the Stigma-Free Willmar site, in exchange for sponsoring and facilitating Stigma-Free Willmar’s fraudulent participation in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. In exchange, Feeding Our Future received nearly $500,000 in administrative fees for sponsoring the Stigma-Free Willmar site’s participation in the program.  In December 2021, the defendant paid $5,750 to a GoFundMe account for Feeding Our Future created by Aimee Bock.

In total, Stigma-Free Willmar received over $5.3 million in payments from Feeding Our Future based on fraudulent claims. As part of his sentence, Mohamud was ordered to forfeit the Kelly’s 19^th Hole property, and $378,207.20 in fraudulent funds seized from his Tunyar Trading LLC bank account.

Mohamud pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court before Judge Nancy E. Brasel. A sentencing hearing will be scheduled at a later date.

The case is the result of an investigation by the FBI, IRS – Criminal Investigations, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph H. Thompson, Harry M. Jacobs, Matthew S. Ebert, and Daniel W. Bobier are prosecuting the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Baune is handling the seizure and forfeiture of assets.