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Two Brooklyn recruiters have admitted what every hardworking American already suspected: a $68 million Medicaid rip-off that preyed on the elderly and stole from taxpayers. Federal prosecutors say Elaine Antao and Manal Wasef pleaded guilty in federal court on January 15, 2026, for steering patients to sham providers in exchange for illegal cash kickbacks and filing false Medicaid claims.
This was no small-time grift — investigators say the fraud involved two social adult day care centers and a home health fiscal intermediary that billed Medicaid for services never provided, part of a scheme running from October 2017 through July 2024. The ringleader, Zakia Khan, previously admitted to orchestrating the scheme and pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in August 2025, according to Justice Department filings.
Officials report the conspirators laundered proceeds through multiple business entities and used the cash to pay bribes to recruiters and recipients so the false claims would keep flowing. As part of plea agreements, the defendants agreed to forfeitures — Khan forfeited roughly $5 million in seized assets, while the two recent plea deals included about $1 million in forfeitures between them — but the scale of theft dwarfs those amounts.
Patriots should be furious but not surprised. When government programs become bureaucratic mazes with weak oversight, criminal opportunists will exploit every loophole. This theft targeted our seniors and the safety-net programs meant to protect them; conservatives demand not sympathy for the crooks but swift and severe punishment for those who turn social programs into personal bank accounts.
The case exposes the predictable weakness of states’ sprawling home-care frameworks — particularly the fiscal intermediary model that lets middlemen skim and dodge accountability. Federal prosecutors first unsealed the indictment in October 2024, showing how a web of recruiters, owners, and fiscal intermediaries converted public care dollars into private profit; that structural failure is an invitation to crime.
What taxpayers need now is action, not platitudes. Lawmakers should strip away perverse incentives, tighten enrollment and billing verification, and impose tougher criminal penalties for anyone who launders public benefits or pays kickbacks to steal from the vulnerable. Republicans who claim to stand for fiscal responsibility must turn words into laws that protect seniors and stop bureaucratic theft.
This prosecution proves law enforcement can dismantle even large, sophisticated fraud rings, and they should be praised for holding the guilty to account. But prosecutions after the fact are a bandage, not a cure — voters should demand program reform, not more excuses from the same officials who failed to stop the theft. America must refuse to let the scales tip toward fraud and decay; our seniors and taxpayers deserve better.
