Since Somali scams are a hot topic, I have stories. I lived in Des Moines, IA for 2.5 years from mid 2012 to early 2015. Like Minnesota, the government airdropped a huge amount of supposed "refugees" on unsuspecting Midwesterners. I got a job doing graphic design and working at a photocopy shop. I lived in East Village near a Section 8 housing complex full of Somalis and the photocopy shop was near a second complex around the Drake campus. WORKING — We had a dozen or so Somalis coming into the copy shop daily running various scams. There were two primary scams: 1. We had around 10 Somali men who’d come in every 2-3 days to fax loan applications. The government offers staggering amounts of money to underprivileged, minority, and immigrant-owned businesses (aka not for you, whitey. Shut up and pay your taxes), which the Somalis would constantly apply for. As far as I could tell not one of them had an actual business. I'm guessing they used the money from the new loan to pay off their last loan. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum. 2. A large group of Somali women would come in several times per week to file lost/stolen cell phone claims, getting a new one and selling the old one. Not sure how they pulled this off, but it was so constant that we had nicknames for the various scammers. We had one woman we called “Light Bulb” (guess why) who was particularly repugnant. Rude, aggressive, demanding, smelly. She’d bring her 5 screaming children into the store, who would immediately run rampant throughout the place. And my god... just imagine an unwashed, heavily-robed body in an extremely humid Midwestern summer. We’d have to air the place out when one of them spent more than a few minutes in the shop to clear out the miasma. I don’t think showering is a thing in that country. I knew a guy who worked at a Verizon store (their largest scam target) and asked him how to report the extremely blatant fraud. He told me “Believe me, we know. They do it to us too. Management won’t do anything about it because the Somalis cry racism. Nobody wants to deal with that.” LIVING: I lived in one of the more desirable apartment complexes in the area (E300 — for anybody familiar with Des Moines, it's the same building with Zombie Burger). My room was on the 5th floor overlooking the parking lot. I’d look out the window and see Somali children trying to break into cars at least a few times per week. This was mostly small children too, anywhere from 6-12 years old. I habitually lock everything, but not everyone did. These kids would ransack cars in the middle of the day, stealing whatever they’d find inside. This happened all over the main drag near the Section 8 housing complex. I called the cops the first time I saw this happen, which was met with “We can’t really do anything about this.” I gave up trying after the third incident. I met an off-duty cop at the bar one night and asked him about it. Again the justification for lack of action was “we don’t want to deal with the racism accusations”. Every business in the area banned backpacks in the stores because “teens” would do loot-and-run operations. While it was a blanket ban on everybody, it was pretty obvious who was committing these crimes. I never once saw a Somali working a normal job the entire time I lived in Des Moines. You’d think with the large numbers of them around town, you’d see them working at places like grocery stores etc. As far as my friends and I could tell, not one of them was employed and were all existing off a combination of government handouts and scams. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Somalis have much larger-scale Minnesota-style fraud operations in Des Moines. Anybody who has the ability to look into this should check out Iowa. There is a very clear pattern of scamming, and the odds are huge that Somalis are defrauding the American people everywhere they go.