Federal prosecutors announced new indictments Thursday in the widening Minnesota fraud scandal, this time involving two Philadelphia-based men accused of traveling to Minneapolis after a friend told them the taxpayer-funded programs there presented “a good opportunity to make money.”
“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry – people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who brought the new charges. “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”
The two men, Anthony Waddel Jefferson and Lester Brown, were accused of siphoning millions from federally funded programs administered by Minnesota officials that were meant to help the disabled and those suffering from addiction, according to court filings…