The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) has made a report regarding the use of food stamp fraud to finance terrorism in the United States and abroad. Money from food stamp fraud financed the first bombing of the World Trade center in 1993. It was also used in the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.
The use of food stamp fraud first appeared in the 1980s but did not create a stir until investigators testified before Congress that it was food stamp fraud money that financed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The detectives told Congress that at least $125 million found it’s way to terrorists.
One of the masterminds of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, Mahmud Abouhalima, funded the attacks by operating a million-dollar food stamp fraud scheme out of a video store in Brooklyn.
But the U.S. government did not pinpoint how a lot of these terrorists used money from food stamp fraud to fund their attacks until shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) identified that many terrorists would get away with funding their illicit activities by using businesses known as “hawalas” to launder money.
A “hawala”— which is an Arabic term defined in English as the transfer (or trust)— is a method of transferring money through informal agents from international networks, and many Muslim immigrants settled in western countries use the “hawala” method to transfer funds to family members.
It’s nearly impossible to track the money sent through the hawalas and that makes them very popular among drug cartels and terrorists who can launder money through them.