by Walter W. Murray, reporter
It’s the biggest scandal you haven’t heard of yet: American tax dollars being converted into welfare, cashed out, slipped into suitcases and smuggled out of the country.
Think that’s bad? This gets even worse!
That cash – money honest taxpayers earned through hard work – is then shipped straight into the pockets of radical Islamic terrorists!
Fox 9 in Minneapolis trailed a man its sources said carried a suitcase with $1 million in it through security and onto a flight out of the country, a scenario it says is happening almost weekly now.
John Hinderaker of the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative Minnesota think tank, said “the scale of fraud disclosed here is astonishing” and wondered if this would turn out to be the worst scandal in his state’s history.
It could very well be.
It might even turn into one of the worst scandals in the history of the nation!
Fox 9 reports that much of the money is coming from the Somali refugee community, including many on government assistance who wouldn’t seem to have much money to send in the first place.
Where they could be getting it from is guaranteed to outrage you.
The station believes this is part of a well-known scheme in which bogus daycares are set up, then they conscript low-income people to “enroll” their children using taxpayer-funded benefits.
They show up with a kid, sign the child in… then leave with their kid.
The child never spends more than a few minutes at the “daycare” — and sometimes doesn’t even come at all.
But the “daycare” bills the state for a full day of “care.”
“We found records that she was collecting a significant amount of money for a much larger number of children than were actually attending the center,” Craig Lisher of the FBI said of one daycare operator, according to Fox 9. “We are aware that some of the funds went overseas, what she was cashing out, money from the business.”
About 10 more daycares are under surveillance right now, and the station said it has identified dozens more as suspicious.
That level of fraud alone is alarming, and Fox 9 says it’s costing taxpayers $100 million a year.
But what happens next is downright shocking.
The station said Glen Kerns, a former Seattle police detective who spent 15 years on the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, believes this is the money being shipped out in those suitcases.
“We had sources that told us, ‘It’s welfare fraud, it’s all about the daycare,’” said Kerns.
The cash is sent through an informal banking system called hawalas, which is then paid out in to needy relatives or given to others in overseas nations, especially in the Middle East and Africa.
Kerns said at least some of that money is going to a region in Somalia controlled by al Shabaab terrorists, and they take a cut of everything going through their turf.
“I talked to a couple of sources who had lived in that region and I said, ‘If money is going to this hawala do you think it is going to al Shabaab?'” Kerns told the station. “And he said, ‘Oh definitely, that area is controlled by al Shabaab, and they control the Hawala there.’”
If the name “hawala” sounds a little familiar, that’s because Americans were burned by this secret system once before.
It was the preferred cash network of the al-Qaeda terrorists before 9/11 and may have helped them to finance the attacks that left more than 3,000 Americans dead and launched us into multiple wars.
“Al-Qaeda moved much of its money by hawala before 9/11,” wrote the 9/11 Commission. “Hawalas were attractive to al-Qaeda because they, unlike formal financial institutions, were not subject to potential government oversight and did not keep detailed records in standard form.”
The report even notes that some hawalas were no doubt unwitting, thinking they were moving around normal funds… like, perhaps, cash from people in Minnesota to desperate relatives in Africa.
Instead, they were acting as the tools of terrorists.
Now, that system is being used once again – and unless it’s stopped, more Islamic terror will be released on the world… thanks to crooked U.S. welfare payments.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”