Woman pleads guilty to day care fraud — and also ran Feeding Our Future scam and autism center

The woman who was at the center of the viral fraud investigation by Nick Shirley has pleaded guilty to fraud related to a Minneapolis day care she owned.

Prosecutors say 50-year-old Fahima Mahamud owned the Future Leaders Early Learning Center and charged the federal government $854,000 in reimbursements for the Feeding Our Future scam.

She also fraudulently claimed to have provided up to 60,000 meals for needy children on a monthly basis during the scam.

Rather than use the money to feed needy children, she used the vast majority of the ill-gotten gains to buy real estate. Among those purchases was an autism center that billed the federal government $3.1 million over the last five years.

She billed the federal government for child-care expenses as part of the