Parents in Minnesota's Somali community accepted payments of up to $1,500 per child each month to enroll kids in bogus autism treatments at two clinics, federal prosecutors allege, in what the Department of Justice calls the largest autism fraud scheme ever charged.
Four defendants collectively billed Medicaid and state autism funding for $46.6 million over five years, money meant to help children under 21 who actually suffer from autism spectrum disorder. Instead, prosecutors say, the stolen funds bought Kenyan real estate, a semi-truck, and a comfortable living for the accused and their families.
The scheme centered on two facilities: Smart Therapy Center in Minneapolis and Star Autism Center in St. Cloud. Both lost their Minnesota state licenses earlier this year. The new federal indictment lays out a methodical operation in which parents were recruited, children were listed as needing treatment they did not require, and kickback payments were laundered through employee paychecks.
Shamso Ahmed Hassan, 55, co-owned both clinics. Hanaan Mursal Yusuf, 25, worked as Smart Therapy's lead biller. Both Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, residents were charged Thursday with bilking the state's Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program, known as EIDBI, which funds autism services for people under 21.
The indictment describes a recruitment scheme aimed at parents in the local Somali community. Parents who enrolled children for unneeded treatments received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child. The payments were disguised. Defendants wrote checks to employees and family members of the facilities, who then cashed them and passed the money along to the parents.
The code word for these kickback payments, prosecutors say, was "computer."
It remains unclear exactly how many Minneapolis and St. Cloud area children were falsely listed as autistic. But the volume was large enough to generate $46 million in fraudulent healthcare claims between 2019 and 2024. Of that total, $21.2 million flowed directly to Hassan and Yusuf through benefits claimed at the two clinics, court papers allege.
The EIDBI program at the center of this case has grown at a staggering pace. DOJ officials noted that Minnesota's spending on the program rose from just over $600,000 in 2018 to more than $400 million by 2025. That kind of explosive growth, a roughly 660-fold increase in seven years, is the sort of trajectory that invites exactly the kind of fraud prosecutors now describe.
Yusuf initially enrolled with the health department as a Level II autism services provider. On January 1, 2024, she upgraded to Level I status, which the indictment says allowed Smart Therapy to bill at a higher rate for her services. The billing escalation was deliberate, prosecutors allege.
Two additional defendants already took plea deals. Asha Farhan Hassan, 28, and Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, 27, who appear to be siblings, are awaiting sentencing for their roles at both clinics. The new indictment identifies them as co-conspirators whose details match those of unidentified co-conspirators referenced in the filing.
Federal prosecutors traced the stolen funds to specific purchases. Yussuf bought a Freightliner semi-truck with $100,000 of the fraud proceeds and wired another $200,000 to Kenya, a prior indictment alleged. Asha Hassan sent hundreds of thousands of dollars abroad and purchased real estate in Kenya, prosecutors claimed at the time of her arrest last September.
The spending patterns tell their own story. Taxpayer dollars earmarked for disabled children in Minnesota ended up financing property acquisitions on another continent.
The autism billing was not the only fraud prosecutors allege. Hassan also stands accused of scamming adult and child food benefits programs. Starting in December 2020, she claimed Smart Therapy was serving 300 children both breakfast and lunch seven days a week, the indictment states.
By April 2021, the facility was claiming 1,200 meals per day, seven days a week. Prosecutors say Hassan knew the numbers were "grossly inflated." Between 2020 and 2021, she claimed the center served nearly 200,000 meals to children and collected $465,000 for food that was never fully provided.
Shamso Hassan's history with childcare facilities extends well before the autism fraud. She previously helped run Kingdom Kare Learning Center in Minneapolis, which lost its license after surveillance video showed an employee using a long, thick stick to hit 14 children a total of 19 times in April 2017, CBS News reported at the time. State court records show Hassan was named in a case involving more than $40,000 in debts owed by Kingdom Kare Learning Center, LLC, that same year.
A woman whose prior childcare operation was shut down for child abuse went on to co-own two autism treatment centers that billed taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. That sequence alone raises hard questions about how Minnesota's licensing and oversight systems allowed it to happen.
Yusuf, for her part, was previously convicted in 2019 for presenting a fake ID to a police officer and paid a $138 fine.
The charges against Hassan and Yusuf were among 15 indictments the Justice Department unveiled Thursday tied to more than $90 million in stolen taxpayer funding for fraudulent services across Minnesota. In one dramatic scene from the sweep, a suspect leaped from a fourth-story balcony before being apprehended by the FBI.
Both Hassan and Yusuf made initial court appearances Thursday and were released without bond.
The broader context makes the autism case look less like an isolated incident and more like a symptom. Minnesota's social services apparatus has faced mounting scrutiny over fraud. The New York Post previously reported that the state's social services scammers may have stolen as much as $9 billion. A separate HHS review found up to $600 million in improper payments for autism services across four states. And FBI Director Kash Patel has threatened denaturalization and deportation for Somali scammers implicated in the Minnesota fraud cases.
Bruce Rivers, a defense attorney for Yusuf, and Deborah Ellis, representing Abdinajib Yussuf, both declined to comment when reached by the Post. Attorneys for Shamso Hassan and Asha Hassan did not return requests for comment.
Star Autism had its license revoked on January 23. Smart Therapy lost its license on January 7. Both actions came from the state, well after the alleged fraud had been running for years.
The dollar figure is $46 million. But the deeper damage is harder to quantify. Every fraudulent autism claim diverts resources from children who genuinely need help. Every fake enrollment makes it harder for legitimate providers to operate without suspicion. Every kickback payment to a parent willing to misrepresent a child's condition erodes the trust that public health programs depend on to function.
Minnesota built a program that went from $600,000 to $400 million in seven years. It apparently did not build the oversight to match. When you pour that much money into a system with that little accountability, the grifters will find it before the auditors do.
They always do.
