12 charged in $10 million childcare fraud scheme

Federal, state, and local officials charged twelve people in San Diego County with wire fraud and money laundering after an operation dubbed Cradle to Grift found so-called home childcare facilities that, per surveillance footage, mostly had no children in them. Investigators say the defendants submitted attendance records claiming dozens of kids per month while some were not even in the country. One defendant allegedly claimed 23 to 25 children in a two-month span but was recorded with children present only once, on the day of an unannounced inspection.

Officials say the twelve received sums ranging from $300,000 to $1.2 million each, and a related Arizona case involves a man accused of pulling $33 million from a tribal health program using enrolled fake members. Nine of the twelve San Diego defendants originally arrived as refugees, a detail officials leaned on hard in their remarks about the case.

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