Somali fraudsters apparently have some competition from other migrant communities.

A pair of Venezuelan nationals were charged along with two other migrants this week for allegedly stealing and using the identities of over 100 individuals to obtain millions of dollars in federal welfare.

The Venezuelans, both of whom previously enjoyed Temporary Protected Status — Roman Vequiz Fernandez, 32, and Coralba Albarracin Siniva, 24 — and Joel Vicioso Fernandez, a 42-year-old Dominican national and permanent resident of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to use, transfer, acquire, and possess Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

‘It is not particularly hard to identify these scams.’

Joel Fernandez’s brother, Raul Fernandez Vicioso — a 37-year-old Dominican national and naturalized U.S. citizen who also lives in Fitchburg — was charged with conspiracy to commit SNAP fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, SNAP benefit fraud, aiding and abetting, and money laundering.

Charging documents allege that the men and their co-conspirators used 117 stolen identities from individuals in six states and Puerto Rico to create 24 “households” in SNAP applications. The “households” were said on average to contain four to five people, and all of the fraudulent “households” were listed as living in two single-family apartments in Providence, Rhode Island.

While there was already ample cause for the Rhode Island Office of Internal Audit to suspect something was off, the alleged fraudsters also used the same bogus lease agreement in support of 17 of the 24 applications and routinely submitted and accessed the online applications using the same out-of-state IP address.

RELATED: Mike Lee reveals the real victims of Somali fraud: ‘It is not the rich people who suffer’

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The charging document noted that Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance records identified the theft of approximately $115,000 in SNAP funds in relation to this scheme; however, the state agency did not appear to bother informing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General or any other law enforcement agency.

U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley hammered this point again during a press conference on Tuesday, stating that the USDA OIG “is not aware of the Massachusetts DTA making any referral report to the USDA concerning this theft.”

Apparently eager to steal even more, the Dominican nationals allegedly used their own personal information to create additional fraudulent SNAP benefit accounts, which involved the alleged use of fake passports and passport cards.

Investigators found that metadata from images of the counterfeit documents indicated they were taken in Leominster, Massachusetts, at the site of El Primo Restaurant, an establishment operated by the younger brother.

The suspected fraudsters had allegedly been using the stolen welfare benefits to purchase bulk food items for retail sale at the restaurant.

Federal agents raided the restaurant and Vicioso’s residence on Sept. 24, 2025, and found approximately 20 fraudulently obtained Rhode Island and Massachusetts EBT cards, fraudulent documents, a handwritten list of identities, SNAP-related mailings, and a machine that enables stolen EBT card information to be loaded on a physical payment card, alleged the charging documents.

The Justice Department noted that in addition to allegedly fraudulently obtaining at least $440,000 in SNAP benefits from Massachusetts and Rhode Island between December 2023 and September 2025, the defendants allegedly also fraudulently secured over $700,000 by submitting bogus applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits in Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington from 2020 to 2021.

For the alleged PUA fraud, at least 29 different identities were used on the applications, not including Vicioso and Fernandez, who also allegedly issued applications in their own names.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Foley told reporters on Friday. “We are investigating many more benefit fraud cases in my office, and today is just the beginning.”

In December, Foley’s office announced the arrests of two men — Antonio Bonheur, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and Saul Alisme, a Haitian national — who allegedly engaged in a scheme to obtain millions of dollars’ worth of SNAP benefits through small retail stores they ran in Boston.

The duo are also accused of selling donated food product intended for starving children overseas.

“It is not particularly hard to identify these scams, but if you don’t even care to look or prosecute those involved, essentially allowing criminals to steal vast amounts of taxpayer money with impunity, the scams will continue to proliferate unabated,” added Foley.

The U.S Government Accountability Office noted in a September 2024 report that an estimated 11.7% or $10.5 billion of SNAP benefits paid out by the USDA in fiscal year 2023 “were the wrong amount or otherwise should not have been made.”

Last year, the USDA indicated that the national payment error rate for fiscal year 2024 was 10.93%.

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Court-packing — the act of adding judges to get favorable outcomes — is a no-go for anyone who cares about protecting a republic from backsliding into totalitarianism. Venezuela, Cuba, Poland, Hungary, and El Salvador, among other nations, are cautionary tales of what happens to countries who cheat the system by filling the courts with loyalists.

And yet, Utah has just done exactly that. On January 31, Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed Senate Bill 134 into law, increasing the Supreme Court from five to seven justices.

Glenn Beck is enraged that it was Republicans — who have historically rejected court-packing as a dangerous, anti-democratic move — who pushed this through.

“Any country that has ever done this, they fall into totalitarianism because they realize they can just change the referees. They’ll just add more referees, and they’ll add the referees they like,” he says, dismissing the Utah Republicans behind this judicial move as “hypocrites.”

Utah has been having problems with its judges legislating, instead of just interpreting existing laws, as is their designated role, he explains. This issue largely stems from the fact that Utah has adopted the Missouri Plan, in which a list of suitable judicial candidates is compiled by legal experts before the governor makes his or her selection.

“Can we stop being a country run by experts? We see exactly what the experts have done in every category. Stop it,” Glenn pleads.

The real issue, he says, is massive delays and overload in lower state courts. For years, Utahns have begged for reform but to no avail. Some may perceive the state government’s decision to add judges to the Supreme Court — which “wasn’t overrun” — as a solution to their woes, but it’s really just a power grab.

“This is not about efficiency. This is all about control,” Glenn says, “and I understand you have bad judges and they’ve been legislating, but you don’t do this, Utah.”

Republicans, accustomed to controlling Utah, have grown “soft,” “mushy,” and “embarrassed that they actually believe in the Constitution,” he explains, and now that they’ve “made all these mistakes, all these compromises,” they’re doing damage control by packing the Supreme Court.

“Republicans, you don’t get a pass here because Democrats would do it too. That argument damns the republic. … A legislature that expands a court after losing cases is not defending a republic. It’s announcing, constitutional limits only apply, you know, unless they’re inconvenient,” Glenn criticizes.

The root issue of Utah’s hypocritical compromising, he argues, can be found in America’s universities, which “despise the Constitution” and are teaching America’s future judges, journalists, lawyers, and bureaucrats that Marxism is morality.

“In a state that was raised on the Constitution, you know better than this,” Glenn says to Utah Republicans.

“Why are you shrinking from conflict, as if defending principles is somehow impolite?” he asks. “It is not impolite. It is required of you to stand. A republic cannot survive this kind of shyness. … You must stand, or you will lose everything.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah painted a bleak picture of the real consequences of the Somali fraud that was recently uncovered at illegitimate child-care facilities and “learing” centers in Minnesota.

During a Wednesday Senate hearing, Lee demonstrated that elites won’t have to foot the multibillion dollar bill, but rather everyday Americans.

‘This is, if anything, the tip of a tip of the iceberg.’

“You don’t put a hornet’s nest in your child’s bedroom and expect that it won’t cause problems at some point,” Lee said during the hearing. “You don’t release blank checks and allow those blank checks to be cashed at will by people who are not directly paying the bill because somebody else is, 350 million Americans who are sharing in that burden, and expect there not to be fraud.”

“Not just occasional fraud, but massive, earthshaking kinds of fraud that cause people to lose faith in the system.”

RELATED: Exclusive: Republicans pen OMAR Act, targeting lawmakers who have ‘blurred’ ethical lines

Lee noted that the extent of this rampant fraud is not merely a bug, but a feature of Democrat-run states and soft-on-crime cities. Although the fraud uncovered by journalists like Nick Shirley is staggering, Lee and his Republican colleagues noted that Minnesota is bound to be just one example of many states that have turned a blind eye to this financial abuse.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Lee said. “This is, if anything, the tip of a tip of the iceberg.”

RELATED: Trump offers hilarious rebuttal to Tim Walz’s absurd Civil War analogy

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“The federal government is $38 and a half trillion in debt,” Lee said. “When we look at the fact that we have impoverished Americans, keep in mind, when we spend this much money that we don’t have, adding to that $38 and a half trillion debt at a staggering rate approaching $2 trillion a year, what does that do?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Lee said. “It is not the rich people who suffer.”

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