August 12, 2025 (SAINT PAUL) – Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced that today his office’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) obtained guilty verdicts at the criminal trial of Abdifatah Yusuf in Hennepin County. A jury found Yusuf guilty of six counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle (over $35,000). The jury also found multiple aggravating factors existed to support an upward departure from the Minnesota sentencing guidelines. Yusuf will be sentenced before the Honorable Sarah S. West at a later date to be set by the Court.
In June 2024, Attorney General Ellison’s MFCU charged Yusuf with bilking the Minnesota Medical Assistance (Medicaid) program through his agency, Promise Health Services, LLC. Promise claimed to provide home and community based (waivered) services, but it lacked any office building and operated for years out of a mailbox. Yusuf and his family members fraudulently obtained Medicaid funds by billing for services not provided, services that were billed based on false documentation, services that were overbilled, services that were billed but lacked any documentation to support the services, and kickbacks provided to recipients to induce them to receive “services” from the agency.
While Yusuf operated Promise, the agency stole over $7 million. MFCU investigators determined that Yusuf frequently used the money stolen from the Medicaid program to fund a lavish lifestyle for himself and his family, including directing over $1 million from the Promise business account into Yusuf’s personal account and withdrawing over $387,000 in cash. Yusuf and his wife also spent more than $22,000 at furniture stores despite Promise lacking any physical office space, spent over $42,000 at luxury automotive dealers, and over $80,000 at luxury clothing stores including Coach, Canada Goose, Michael Kors, Third Degree Heat, Nike, and Nordstrom…