Minnesota daycare fraudster charged, but not before she tried to leave the country
By Easton Martin | May 21, 2026
Federal prosecutors have unsealed fraud charges against a Minneapolis daycare owner who allegedly tried to flee the United States just days after closing her center down.
Fahima Egeh Mahamud, the owner of Future Leaders Early Learning Center in Minneapolis, faces multiple federal charges for her alleged role in two separate government assistance fraud schemes totalizing millions of dollars.
According to court documents, Mahamud abruptly notified state regulators in February that she was closing her childcare center. The FBI reported that she booked an international flight to London the exact same day she initiated the closure, intending to leave the country within forty-eight hours. Federal authorities intervened and arrested Mahamud before she could board the flight. She is currently placed under house arrest.
Federal prosecutors state that Future Leaders Early Learning Center initially operated as a food distribution site sponsored by the nonprofit organization Feeding Our Future. The nonprofit is currently at the center of a sprawling $250 million federal fraud investigation. Charges indicate that during the pandemic, Mahamud claimed to serve meals to 1,000 children per day, seven days a week. At its peak, the center claimed to serve 60,000 meals monthly. Prosecutors allege that the center received $854,000 in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds, but spent only a fraction of that money on actual food, pocketing the rest of the taxpayer funding.
In addition to the meal program fraud, a newly unsealed criminal information alleges that Mahamud orchestrated a second multi-million dollar scheme through Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program, known as CCAP.
Between October 2022 and December 2025, Mahamud and her business allegedly submitted more than 13,000 reimbursement claims through CCAP. State data indicates that Future Leaders received $3.7 million in CCAP funding in 2025 alone, making it the highest-funded daycare under the program in the state of Minnesota for that year.
CCAP rules require childcare providers to collect mandatory co-payments from families and certify those payments upon submitting reimbursement requests. Federal prosecutors allege that Mahamud submitted thousands of claims and falsely certified that she collected those co-payments from low-income families, yielding $4.6 million in fraudulent reimbursements.
