Fox Business

A U.S. Department of Agriculture employee and five others are under arrest as of Friday morning, after allegedly misappropriating tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer food stamp funds.

[. . .] With the assistance of the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office, six individuals have been criminally charged with a bribe and fraud scheme that generated more than $66 million in unauthorized transactions under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.

The defendants – Michael Kehoe, Mohamad Nawafleh, Omar Alrawashdeh, Gamal Obaid, Emad Alrawashdeh and Arlasa Davis – are accused of “conspiracy to steal government funds and to misappropriate U.S. Department of Agriculture benefits”.

Starting in 2019, the indictment states that Kehoe created a network that supplied 160 unauthorized electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to stores across the New York area, to illegally process more than $30 million in EBT transactions.

“This fraud was made possible when USDA employee Arlasa Davis betrayed the public trust by selling confidential government information to the very criminals she was supposed to catch. Their actions undermined a program that vulnerable New Yorkers depend on for basic nutrition,” U.S. Attorney Perry Carbone said in the media release.

[. . .] The group also allegedly created fraudulent USDA applications, misappropriated license numbers and, in some cases, doctored application documents for unauthorized stores.