Proud to be joined by what President Trump calls the untouchables up here today. Everybody looks good. They do a good job, but most importantly, they hate fraud. And to the local field agents here at the FBI office here in southwestern Ohio, I just want to say thank you for all your hard work. We could not do this without you. Obviously, our great agents all across the country have been enlisted in this war against fraud. But the folks here in particular, I'm glad to be with you here in person and to be able to say thank you face to face.
So, to the press, we've got a very big announcement on fraud and something I'm very proud of. I know we've been working on it for quite a long time. And the big announcement here, unfortunately, Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, who has been a real fighter against fraud in the SNAP program, her flight was a little delayed. She should have rode with me, Brooke. I told you that. But she can't be here today. But we do have somebody from the Department of Agriculture who's going to speak to this a little bit more in detail. That we have way too much fraud in the SNAP program.
Now, what is the SNAP program? Let's step back for a little bit and realize that this is a program, I think, one of the most important social service programs that we have in the United States of America. A program that ensures that all of our fellow citizens, particularly children, are able to have a full belly at the end of every single night, that regardless of whether they can pay for a meal, we don't let American children and American families go hungry. That is one of the most important and sacred things that our tax dollars go to, making sure that our fellow citizens don't go hungry at night.
That is an amazing accomplishment, by the way, of American citizenship, of American leadership, and obviously a lot of countries have followed our lead in ensuring that they have a basic social safety net that ensures things like people who can't afford a doctor are able to get a doctor, and in this case children don't go hungry at night because they can afford a meal at the end of the day. Unfortunately, like with so many of these other amazing programs, we find that there are people out there who decide to commit fraud against these programs, who quite literally in this case will steal from the mouths of hungry children in order to enrich themselves. And that cannot go on.
And thanks to President Trump's leadership, we are fighting and winning the war against fraud in the SNAP program. Now, there's one guy in particular. Do we have a TV up here? I know we were going to show the video. Oh, here to my right. So, that's my private jet. You broke mother. Get you a check. Get you a check. You ain't guy's a real winner. Cuz you're broke. Oh, he out here with his private jet. You broke mother. [laughter]
Okay. So that amazing young man, amazing citizen, goes by the name of, and I want to make sure that I get this right, he goes by the name of Shoddy Dread. Now to the press, the best part about Shoddy Dread is that my amazing staff, worried that I would be unable to pronounce Shoddy Dread, included a handy-dandy phonetic spelling of Shoddy Dread. But no, guys, I got it.
The simple fact is this is a man that we have connected to $4.4 million in fraud against the SNAP program. A guy who is quite literally taking food from the mouths of children so that he can enrich himself. And I'll let Todd Blanche talk a little bit about this. But we have prosecuted this guy and prosecuted so many other fraudsters, and we're going to keep on doing it because one of the most important lessons that we can send is that you shouldn't be able to, and you can't get rich off of fraud.
SNAP exists to help hungry children eat. It does not exist to provide private jets to a guy like Shoddy Dread. And the fact that so many people feel like they can get rich off of our social safety net rather than ensuring that money goes to where it should go is evidence that for too long in this country we looked the other way. Well, we're done with that. We are done looking when it comes to fraud.
Now I'm going to go for a campaign rally in a second with John Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy, but let me just give a particular shout out to John Husted because he has been one of the leaders who has helped us fight for mandatory minimums against fraudsters. One of the problems with our efforts to fight fraud, as much as we've been doing great work, as much as I'm proud of the amazing team behind me, is that when we catch a fraudster, they are very often by the judicial system given a slap on the wrist and let out back into our country. That has got to stop.
So, John Husted and a number of other congressional Republicans have worked with us to try to increase the mandatory minimums when we catch fraudsters. If you commit fraud against SNAP, you should go to jail and you should go to jail for a very long time. We are fighting and working hard to make sure that happens. I'll let the great attorney general speak more to that issue and in more detail about our efforts to fight fraud. So with that, I'll thank you all again. Turn it over to Todd. Todd, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. And the vice president's right that President Trump started this effort about a year ago. We started talking about it and asked the vice president to lead this effort. And what have you, you have seen almost every week for the past six, seven months is the vice president standing in front of these cameras talking about one way or another that we are executing on President Trump's agenda to get rid of every single dollar of fraud that takes place in this country.
I want to also thank the Department of Agriculture and Secretary Rollins for really kicking up the effort when it comes to combating SNAP fraud. What we did starting in September 1st of this year, so less than two months ago, seven weeks ago, is we started a surge to focus a lot of our efforts using the inspector general from the Department of Agriculture, who's here on the stage with us today, and members of the HSI, DHS federal agents, to focus on SNAP fraud. In that time, we have uncovered $42 million in fraud associated with the SNAP program.
This fraud comes in all different ways. It comes from these criminals actually stealing the money off the cards that are used to purchase food by our most needy in the country. It comes from just outright theft and taking money from the people that are supposed to be receiving these benefits. To put this number in perspective, 220,000 Americans could have eaten for the entire month of October if it were not for this $42 million in fraud.
So, this is not some small little effort by just like the man that you just saw on that screen. This is a concerted effort to literally take food out of the mouths of children, and it's going to stop. So, we have US attorneys on the stage behind me. We have the inspector general from the Department of Agriculture behind me, and they are leading the effort to stop this. We've indicted men and women in 13 different districts just in the past seven weeks, and that effort will continue for as long as it takes.
There's one story that struck out at me that I want to talk about. There was a woman who was a victim of SNAP fraud. She didn't know it, but criminals had actually used a program to actually take all the money out of her card, all the money designed for her to buy food for her children. She had children between the ages of three and 12. She goes shopping for her kids, has a shopping cart full of food, goes up to the counter with her kids next to her, hands her SNAP card with the benefits on it to the cashier who runs it and says, 'There's no money. You can't buy this food.'
She's not only humiliated in front of her children, but she doesn't have a way to put food on the table that night because of these fraudsters. She ultimately told investigators that she had to take a loan to have enough money to feed her children. So, that's the work that we're combating. I couldn't agree with the vice president more that there is more we need to do, working with our great senators who are focused on these issues, to increase mandatory minimums for these fraudsters and increase the penalties so that if you do get caught, and you will get caught, you go to prison for a long time, and hopefully as the sentences get stronger, it'll actually deter these criminals from engaging in this conduct.
So thank you all for being here today. Today I want to thank again the vice president for his leadership and leading the effort to help us really rid fraud from this country. And I'd like to invite Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald to say a few words as well. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
Well, good morning and thank you, Mr. Attorney General and Mr. Vice President. There is no more noble or more compassionate taxpayer-funded program than those provided by USDA. Food for hungry children. Relief for moms and dads struggling to put dinner on the table tonight. If ever a fraudster had limits, if ever a fraudster might say, 'Those dollars do too much good. They protect too many vulnerable kids and parents. These dollars are too noble for me to take,' it would be SNAP. But there is no program too noble for a fraudster. They will take whatever they can, no matter the financial cost and no matter the human toll.
You've heard the topline figures from today's first-ever nationwide SNAP benefits enforcement surge. The individual cases show in even greater detail the scope of deception, greed, and exploitation we are confronting in these cases. And I will give three short examples. First, right here in the Southern District of Ohio, under the leadership of US Attorney Dominick Gerace, an indictment has been returned against defendants Jorag Yasin and Ramy Kanan. Based on the allegations, these defendants used their food stores to generate thousands of fake food purchases, ultimately resulting in a loss of approximately $29.7 million to the United States. Yasine and Kanan are charged with multiple felonies and were arrested just a few hours ago this morning in Chicago.
Second, prosecutors in the District of Massachusetts have filed a criminal complaint against Rulo Armando Fernandez Guzman. As alleged, Guzman was a two-time felon and a Dominican national. He is suspected to be unlawfully in the United States. Based on the allegations, Guzman stole the identity of a United States citizen to fraudulently obtain $22,000 in SNAP benefits, $98,000 in Medicaid benefits, and $45,000 in Section 8 housing benefits. This is one of the many cases charged this year involving suspected illegal aliens stealing the identities of Americans to then steal from America.
The third case I will highlight in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, multiple defendants have been indicted on a range of charges including SNAP fraud, social security fraud, kidnapping, transportation of individuals for illicit sexual activity, and other crimes. Based on these allegations, the scheme involved grooming and then luring intellectually disabled women to live with them for the purpose of controlling their social security and SNAP benefits. The defendants in this case were arrested last Wednesday and they will be answering these serious allegations in federal court.
These cases and allegations reveal the scope of deception, greed, and human exploitation permeating SNAP fraud schemes. These are not paperwork crimes. The tools of justice must be and are fully activated to protect the innocent, provide for our most vulnerable, punish the wrongdoer, and restore the public's confidence that those who engage in fraud will truly indeed be brought to justice. And the public servants assembled by President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Attorney General Blanche are resolved to achieve all of those goals. The American people deserve nothing less.
I want to thank USDA OIG John Walk, HSI acting executive director John Condon, the agents and the prosecutors, some in this room right now, for their hard work to pull off this first-ever nationwide SNAP surge. This is the first, but it will not be the last. And I commend the agents and the prosecutors for their hard work. And I'll now turn the podium over to Chairman Andrew Ferguson.
Thank you, Colin. Thank you, Mr. Vice President. I want to take a minute just to explain why the creation of the anti-fraud task force was so important and why the vice president's leadership has been one of the most important things that any vice president has ever done. Every morning when Ohioans wake up and they go to the factory, to the farm, to the field, to the school, to the hospital, or to the office, they spend part of their day working to pay for food to go to their neighbors and friends in need. It is part of an arrangement we have struck as a society among all of us that we are going to pay. We're going to spend part of our day working to help our families, our friends, and our neighbors when they are in need.
And we have this deal on the basis of trust among each other that citizens held together in this great country are going to work together to take care of the hardest for us. And what has been happening in this country under the watch of Democrats in states all over the country is that people like Shoddy Dread come and pick the money right out of your pocket. The money that you earned on the job that you're then supposed to give to help kids and families eat in Ohio, takes it right out of your pocket and buys watches and cars and real estate. The American people did not sign up to pay for Shoddy Dread to get a fancy watch and a flight on a private jet. I didn't anyway. I don't think anyone else up here did either.
That is why this task force is so important. We are restoring social trust. We are saving these programs and we are reinstilling justice to make sure that when Americans go to work and they pay their taxes, they can truly believe and know that the taxes are going to go to help the people that we all agreed we were going to help. And it would not be happening without the men on the stage and without the vice president's leadership because this isn't just a prosecutorial function. The men up here are making sure that people that do this go to jail and go to jail for a long time.
But we can't just be about throwing them in jail. We have to prevent this from happening in the first place. Which means you need someone like the vice president who sits atop the rest of the government who can help DOJ prosecute these people, can promote legislation to increase the penalties, and can make sure that the administrative apparatus prevents the fraud from happening in the first place. And an incredible range of talent has come to work on this task force to work in these departments to stop the fraud from happening. The general counsel of the task force who saddled up to work for Vice President Vance is from right in here in Ohio. He helped articulate the legal frameworks for so many of the actions that the task force has taken today.
But that's the minutia. The big thing we're doing is making sure that when honest American citizens go to work on the deal that we all struck, that part of what we're going to do on the job is help pay to help our families and friends in need, that it's actually going to happen and thugs like Shoddy Dread are not going to walk between them and American citizens and take money out of the mouths of children and out of the pockets of hardworking workers here in America. That is why this is so important. It is a shame that it took this long to fix it, but I am incredibly grateful that the vice president has been the one that has been able to come in, sit atop the government, and get this done. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to John Walk, the Inspector General of USDA, who is responsible for many of today's actions.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Mr. Vice President, thank you for your leadership against fraud on the American taxpayer. USDA's Office of Inspector General has been a proud part of your whole-of-government fight to eliminate fraud. Our law enforcement agents have worked tirelessly across the country from Seattle to Miami, Jackson, Mississippi to Cleveland, Ohio to disrupt fraud, restore integrity to federal programs, and arrest criminal fraudsters who steal from hardworking American taxpayers.
SNAP fraud despicably robs from low-income Americans that rely on the program for food assistance and diverts taxpayer funds to line the pockets of fraudsters and bankroll criminal activities: drugs, guns, transnational organized crime. We've known that some of this money has gone to terrorist organizations. No more, Mr. Vice President. USDA is committed to supporting your leadership to disrupt fraud schemes and send criminals straight to prison.
I'm grateful for our special agents whose work as part of the nationwide surge brought significant law enforcement actions against fraudsters in dozens of cases around the country. I also want to make sure I say thank you to the department through their FNS who has worked on administrative actions to stop trafficking of SNAP benefits and have turned off authorizations for stores that are able to collect fraudulently, as well as to destroy more than 2,000 illicit point-of-sale devices.
I'd like to just make sure I highlight what Attorney General Todd Blanche highlighted when he spoke about this mother who was a victim of SNAP fraud. Unfortunately, that's all too common. I've seen too many of those victim stories come across my desk. I'm thinking about the case we investigated just a few months ago. Two illegal aliens, they stole from 3,000 SNAP victims. The case we just saw in Atlanta, this person stole 300, some 350 identities and used that false information to gain SNAP benefits for himself.
So, we really want to think about the victims and I'm so glad that you and President Trump are spearheading this fight for the victims and this surge is only the start. We will continue to unite behind our partners and behind your whole-of-government fight to eliminate fraud and hold fraudsters to account. Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
Well, great job to the team. Let me just close with two other comments before I turn it over to the reporters. So, first of all, I want to echo what Todd Blanche said. You know, I worked as a cashier at a grocery store for a couple years. Was my very first job, Dilman Foods, probably 20 miles from where we're standing today. And I also had a lot of members of my family benefit from these food benefit programs provided by federal tax dollars.
The simple reality is that it is actually a very tough thing to go through a line with kids. Kids being as kids, they often misbehave at grocery stores, as a lot of us with young kids know. To present that card, to expect to be able to take that food home to your family, to be able to cook it and provide a meal for your kids, and to be told because of the work of a fraudster, because of the theft of a fraudster, that you are being rejected. And there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of families all across our country, all across the state of Ohio who have had that experience because their benefits went to go and pay for private jets for people like Shoddy Dread. It is despicable and I'm proud of this team for making it stop.
And that's the final point I want to make. This work has a lot of unsung heroes and I'm obviously proud of Todd and Colin at the Department of Justice, of Andrew Ferguson, my incredible partner. I would say partner in crime, but it's actually the opposite, partner in fighting crime, and all of these incredible guys at the Department of Agriculture and all the departments we've worked with. But there are dozens and dozens of economists, of 22-year-old staffers, of people who are working 90, 100 hours a week for very little pay to fight fraud and to deliver for the American people.
I just want all of them to know that these are their victories too. They are most importantly the American people's victories. But we got to keep at it because the American people depend on us to fight fraud and that's exactly what we are going to keep doing. With that, I will happily take a few questions. So the bright lights, I can't really see anybody who's raising their hand. So just shout a question.
President. Yes. Daniel Bush with the BBC. Thank you. You mentioned after this you're going to a campaign event. Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign put out a controversial ad featuring his opponent's mother. Republicans, some are backing away from that. Do you think that that ad was appropriate?
Well, I'll be honest with you. Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern. What is my concern is who is going to govern the next generation of American government. Who is going to win the Senate race in the state of Ohio? Who's going to win the governor's race in the state of Ohio? And I got to be honest that when I see Republicans, people in my party reacting so strongly, especially elected officials, look, have the opinion you want to have on that ad. If you think it was too tough, say it was too tough. If you think it wasn't tough enough, say that.
But I have to admit that I'm a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America. So I would say to Ohio Republicans, do you actually think that Amy Acton is unfit to serve as governor of the state of Ohio? I do. Do you actually think that Sherrod Brown should not be given a 50th year in public service to ship American jobs overseas and to bring men into women's sports? Because I do.
I actually think, and I would hope that my fellow Republicans think, that the reason that John Husted should be a United States senator is because he's the right man for the job and because Vivek should be the governor of Ohio. We should actually fight for these candidates. So my message to Republicans is remember some of the ads that have been run against me. I've run in, I guess, two races now in my entire life. People have called Vivek Ramaswamy a murderer in some of the advertisements ran against him. People have called, you know, used the president of the United States. How many times have we seen advertisements using his family members, the Trump family members, to go after the president of the United States? Politics is a tough business.
And my message to my fellow elected Republicans is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days. Next question.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President. And separately, quickly, special envoy Steve Witkoff called Russian President Vladimir Putin a humanitarian for agreeing to release Steven Hubard. Do you agree with that?
I agree with Steve Witkoff saying something nice to a person who just released an American hostage. Whether you agree with the underlying sentiment or not, Steve Witkoff is a diplomat. His job is to go over there and get a job done. I care much less about what Steve said and about the fact that he is bringing an American hostage home to his family. We should all be celebrating that, not be complaining about what Steve Witkoff said in order to get it done. Next.
Mr. Vice President, you mentioned that your family had benefited from the programs that we're talking about here today. And so I'm just wondering when you hear about these stories of other families affected, how has your personal experience shaped your response on this task force?
