Criminals can turn stolen identities bought on the dark web into seemingly legitimate businesses — then use those companies to bill taxpayers for healthcare and other services that were never provided, according to a fraud expert who detailed the scheme to Fox News Digital.

The companies can hide in plain sight: Criminals create LLCs using information that may receive little scrutiny, pair them with stolen identities and submit fraudulent claims for everything from wheelchairs and diabetes treatments to childcare and autism services, according to Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions Government.

But Talcove said the financial losses are only the beginning, warning the schemes can fuel “criminal enterprises.”

“They are using our money against us, whether it’s in social media campaigns, whether it is for human trafficking, drugs, disrupting our economy,” Talcove told Fox News Digital.

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“When you think about fraud, don’t think about, ‘It’s great that we stopped a fraud ring that stole $5 million.’ Think about that as a criminal enterprise that goes beyond just stealing out of a benefit program.”

Despite fraud schemes surfacing nationwide, Talcove said Minnesota was “particularly egregious” because the state had little incentive to stop the fraud.

“Minnesota was particularly egregious once they started looking because it was really easy to find,” he said.

Talcove said one factor allowing the schemes to flourish in Minnesota and across the country is weak verification during the LLC registration process and reliance on “self-reported information.”

“In the case of Minnesota, you went and got your LLC, you opened up a childcare facility, and then the next thing you knew you were billing CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] for childcare or autism care, and nobody checked.”

The Trump administration launched an anti-fraud crackdown this year after Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future scandal, creating a task force led by Vice President JD Vance. The scheme allegedly stole $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program during the pandemic, and many of those charged have since been convicted or sentenced to prison.

Without third-party audits, Talcove said many criminals slip through the cracks, racking up millions before they’re caught.

“One of the fundamental problems with these programs that are literally spending trillions of taxpayer dollars, they have nobody doing investigations or such a small, tiny amount of people that it’s not even possible to investigate,” he said.

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But Talcove said when these schemes are investigated, they expose much more than fraud.

“They’re not just involved in stealing Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamps, or unemployment insurance,” he said. “They have other interests.”

Talcove alleged some criminals use stolen funds to finance sex trafficking by bringing women from other countries and “renting them out” across the U.S., all while profiting from their “ill-gotten gains.”

“What they have to look for is beyond the fraud that they found to see if they’re involved in drugs, human trafficking, threats to our democracy, weapons,” he said.

Calling the fraud a “national security issue,” Talcove said some investigations have uncovered criminal groups involved in benefit fraud, including foreign cybercrime organizations such as APT41, a Chinese-linked hacking group.

“When you start looking at the criminal groups that are involved, APT41 and some of their peers and associates, as well as some of the other groups from North Korea and other countries, it is, right now, a national security issue,” he said.

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However, not all the money is sent to “overseas criminal organizations,” according to Talcove.

“Now, some of it, granted, is being used for luxury goods, homes, cars, vacations, but a lot of it is just going right back to the transnational location that it came from,” he said.

Talcove warned that unless investigators dig deeper, fraudsters will continue to exploit the system.

“They tend to get away with it because the investigation stops once you find the fraud,” he said.

Turning to the government’s role, Talcove said Democrats and Republicans must work together to tackle the nation’s growing debt, starting with stronger efforts to combat fraud.

“My hope is the fiscal situation that we’re currently in, driven by what’s going on with the bond market, is going to force elected leaders at the state and federal level to start paying attention,” he said.

FIRST ON FOX: Anxieties over data centers have cranked up considerably, and one Senate Republican wants to close a tax loophole that he argues tech giants are using as “corporate welfare” to build facilities throughout the country.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., plans on introducing legislation that would tie up a tax loophole for data centers first unleashed by Republicans in 2017 that he charged has been exploited by tech companies to build their sprawling data center facilities. 

It comes as the GOP wrestles with how to handle the data center and AI issue, which has become a major political wedge on the campaign trail, one President Donald Trump has called a “hoax.”

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That loophole, Hawley told Fox News Digital in an interview, is for Opportunity Zones, which he said are generally meant for “for low-income areas, low-income housing, low-income businesses or businesses in low-income areas.”

“These data centers have figured out a way that they think that they can access all of this money,” Hawley said. “So, let’s be clear. This is a form of corporate welfare. They don’t need any welfare. These people are rich. They can pay their own way.”

The tax breaks were first approved by Congress as part of Trump’s first-term tax cuts package, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. That initial bite at the apple established them as a means to spur investment into lower income or forgotten areas where tracts of land were dubbed Opportunity Zones.

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They were then made permanent last year through the “big, beautiful bill,” and though not explicitly intended to be used for data centers, have since provided a route for tech companies to defer, reduce or outright eliminate corporate gains taxes on their investments in the zones.

Since both tax packages were passed, 8,746 Opportunity Zones have cropped up in the U.S., according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, just under half of all zones are in rural areas, where tech goliaths have set their sights on building data centers.

And, according to a report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 14% of all data centers are in Opportunity Zones, while just over 17% of all permitted, approved and under construction data center projects are in the zones.

Hawley’s forthcoming bill would explicitly exclude data centers from being able to access the tax cuts, adding another barrier at the federal level in an attempt to try and slow their rapid development.

And it comes as Congress scrambles to answer the growing fears over unfettered AI development, which data centers play a key role in.

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Concerns have rippled through the halls of the Capitol since its return this week after a call from major players in the AI industry to slow development, which came after engineers at Anthropic revealed on X that there was a roughly 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity within a decade. The topic of reining in the technology is not new.

Three years ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., convened several panels with tech CEOs, including one with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to hash out what AI legislation could look like in Congress.

Since then, there has been little to no legislative action taken.

Hawley argued that Congress needs to at least put guardrails on AI and give people the opportunity to sue tech companies if their data and personal information has been used without their consent.

When asked why no real action had happened since Schumer’s series of AI summits, Hawley contended it was “because all the tech CEOs then promptly gave Schumer and the Democrats gobs and gobs money, and they decided that, you know what, maybe this industry is going fine.”

“And now what you see the same tech CEOs saying is they want an antitrust exemption so they can all talk together and work together,” Hawley said. ‘Any regulations, they want to write them themselves. And they’re out there saying, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling. You need to let us get together, write the regulations and figure out what we’re going to do.’ I’m pretty skeptical of that, I have to say.”

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The U.S. accused Russian intelligence operatives of orchestrating a murder-for-hire plot targeting a Kremlin critic believed to be living in Washington, D.C.

In documents unsealed on Tuesday, federal prosecutors claim the conspiracy was part of a broader global network that recruited people to carry out assassinations and terrorist attacks on behalf of Moscow. The five men charged in the incitement allegedly worked for Russia’s intelligence services, and are accused of being paid and attempting to pay others in the U.S. and abroad to surveil and kill Russian dissidents.

Three of the defendants also face conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire charges. All five defendants remain at large, according to the Justice Department.

According to prosecutors, the alleged operation reached the nation’s capital in late August, when suspected Russian intelligence operatives directed a U.S.-based Venezuelan citizen to secretly film two Washington-area locations tied to a Kremlin critic before allegedly offering him $40,000 to carry out the killing. The recruit completed the surveillance but refused to commit the murder himself, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege the five defendants were members or associates of a Russian intelligence-directed network that financed terrorism and coordinated violent operations across multiple countries.

The recruiter walked the operative through the surveillance step by step, prosecutors say, and allegedly instructed him to put his phone in airplane mode, begin recording before entering the neighborhood, slow as he passed the target’s home and delete the messages afterward.

The indictment says the conspirators used coded language, referring to the assassination as “construction” and the surveillance as “measuring a plot of land.” When the recruit declined to carry out the murder himself, prosecutors allege the network sought other U.S.-based recruits while noting it also had “people in Mexico” available for the job.

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In addition to the alleged murder plot in Washington, the indictment accuses members of the network of supporting attacks on civilian and military infrastructure in Europe and carrying out surveillance of Russian dissidents abroad.

The case marks one of the most serious publicly alleged Russian intelligence operations targeting an individual inside the U.S. in recent years.

The indictment names five alleged members of what prosecutors call the Russian Intelligence Services Network (RIS). They are Yuri Khrameev, a former Russian intelligence colonel known as “Colonel Yuri”; his son, Kirill Khrameev, an officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB); Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, a Cuban national living in Russia whom prosecutors describe as coordinating attacks for the network; Yaidel Delgado Suarez, known as “Viking,” and Angel Eduardo Castro.

Russia has repeatedly been accused by Western governments of targeting political opponents and defectors abroad.

Among the highest-profile cases was the 2018 poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok. British authorities blamed Russian military intelligence for the attack, an allegation Moscow denied.

U.S. officials have also accused Russia of orchestrating killings of Kremlin critics overseas and conducting covert influence and espionage operations inside the United States, though prosecutors say the alleged Washington murder plot represents a rare instance in which Russian operatives sought to recruit someone on U.S. soil to carry out an assassination.

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Prosecutors say the alleged Washington murder plot was part of a much broader Russian intelligence campaign that has operated since at least 2024. According to the indictment, the same network recruited a U.S. citizen in Lithuania to surveil another Kremlin critic before allegedly offering about $25,000 to kill him.

After that recruit refused, prosecutors say the network shifted to soliciting sabotage attacks against infrastructure in countries supporting Ukraine, including alleged plots targeting electrical substations , warehouses and transportation hubs.

The indictment comes as Western governments have warned that Russia has expanded its use of covert operations, sabotage and assassination plots beyond the battlefield since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

U.S. prosecutors allege the network shifted its focus from targeting Russian dissidents and defectors to attacking countries “aligned, or perceived to be aligned, with Ukraine.”

Republican lawmakers were apparently blindsided this week by new documents about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump and was subsequently shot dead.

Crooks opened fire on Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., in July 2024. A bullet grazed the then-candidate’s ear, while a rally attendee was killed as he attempted to shield his family.

“During our piece that we were working on, none of the federal agencies were working with us at all. They were going to work on their own, and they told us, ‘We’re going to do ours, and then we’ll get back to you.’ So this is two years later. Nobody’s gotten back to us,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who chaired a bipartisan House task force aimed at investigating the shooting, told Fox News. 

“That’s under the former administration. So everything that’s under the executive branch at that time, under the Biden administration, we had no access to information at that time,” he said.

Kelly also said the House task force’s Dec. 10, 2024, report was written largely with input from local authorities and little from the federal level.

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“It’s awfully strange that all the questions we asked, ‘We’ll have to get back to you on that.’ And we have very limited time, as you know, to actually get to what we wanted to. So when we finished our report, it was basically based on everything that we could gather from local law enforcement, hardly anything from the feds at that time,” Kelly said.

Fox News Digital reviewed the documents in question and found that Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, had searched for ways to prevent his son from accessing firearms in May 2024, roughly two months before he clambered up a rooftop in his attempt to assassinate Trump.

A source familiar with the task force’s work told Fox News Digital that the May 2024 search by Matthew Crooks was not known to House lawmakers during their investigation.

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“The Task Force report corroborates that Matthew Crooks handed Thomas Crooks the rifle used in the assassination attempt on July 13, 2024,” the source said.

Kelly’s spokesman told Fox News Digital that his office was not aware of federal authorities interviewing Crooks’ family.

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The records were obtained by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, as part of his ongoing inquiry into the Butler assassination attempt. So far, the records turned over to the Senate show Thomas’ actions were a surprise to his family, and his motive is still a mystery.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee told Fox News Digital that they had yet to see the FBI documents, but argued that it was reason enough that the full details of that day in July 2024 needed to be brought to light.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a member of the panel, told Fox News Digital that the documents dump is “something that should have happened,” but there was still “so much that we don’t know about what happened.”

“I think we have got to, I’ve been saying forever now, we have got to have a full accounting of everything that happened on that day, all of the failures, law enforcement failures that occurred,” Hawley said.

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When asked about Crooks’ father trying to stop him from getting access to guns, Hawley said, “This gets back to if this guy was out there, if he was, if he was displaying erratic behavior, was that reported?”

He recalled being on the ground days after the attempt. Hawley described how easily he could’ve gotten onto the rooftop from where Crooks fired off rounds toward the stage and charged that there was “no coordination” among the several local and federal law enforcement agencies present that day.

“I mean, this is just wild. And I still don’t think we’ve gotten a full accounting,” Hawley said. “Pretty much everything we know about this is from whistleblowers. You know, we need a full accounting of what really happened on that day.”

“Listen, otherwise, we run the risk of things like this happening again. And we run the risk of it turning into a, you know, JFK situation where, all of these years later, we still don’t really know what happened,” he continued. “We owe it to the American people to figure out what exactly happened and what we need to fix. Clearly, there were massive failures.”

Anger is boiling over at Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and sanctuary-friendly politicians over “out of control” killings in the state after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked the state not to allow the release of yet another illegal immigrant charged with carrying out a stabbing spree.

ICE sent a request to Spanberger and “her fellow sanctuary politicians” not to release Mexican illegal immigrant Freddi Chigo Mil following his arrest for allegedly stabbing two women on the streets of Staunton, Virginia, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Police responding to the incident found Mil at the scene along with two stabbed women, one of whom was pronounced dead while the other was transported to a local hospital.

Mil is charged with second-degree murder and aggravated malicious wounding causing permanent impairment, according to Middle River Regional Jail records. The same day, ICE arrested Salvadoran illegal immigrant Yinmi Molina-Zepeda in Woodbridge, Virginia, after it was discovered that he is wanted in his home country for aggravated homicide and other crimes.

Commenting on the growing list of illegal immigrants accused of violent crimes in Virginia, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin remarked that “this is what the Commonwealth of Virginia has become under the sanctuary policies of Gov. Abigail Spanberger and her fellow sanctuary politicians.”

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Regarding Mil, Mullin said, “this illegal alien from Mexico has been charged with murder after a stabbing spree that killed one woman and injured another.”

He explained that “ICE has lodged a detainer asking Gov. Spanberger to cooperate with us and commit to not releasing this criminal from jail, so that he can be removed from our country once he faces justice.”

“It’s time to put an end to these preventable tragedies,” he continued, adding, “Deporting illegal aliens saves lives.”

Jennifer Harrison, executive director of the victim advocacy organization Victims’ Rights Reform Council, told Fox News Digital that “everything is out of control in these upside-down jurisdictions run by politicians like Spanberger who call themselves ‘moderate Democrats’ while implementing policies that put criminals ahead of victims and public safety.”

Harrison posed the question: “How much blood has to be spilled in our streets before elected officials wake up and change course?”

“We have reached a point where the federal government has to ask state and local officials not to release dangerous illegal immigrants back into American communities. Think about how insane that is,” Harrison continued.

“These are people who should not be in this country to begin with, and yet after they are accused of committing serious crimes here, when they have dead bodies in front of them, we are still having a debate over whether they should be released back onto our streets.”

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In a news release, DHS pointed to 22 cases of violent crime involving illegal immigrants in Virginia this year. Charges filed against illegal immigrants in Virginia this year include child pornography offenses, sex offenses against children, attempted disarming of a law enforcement officer, murder, aggravated sexual battery, rape, abduction and other serious crimes.

A spokesperson for Spanberger’s office responded by telling Fox News Digital that the governor “strongly believes violent criminals who are in the United States illegally should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and deported.”

The spokesperson said that “under Gov. Spanberger’s leadership, the Virginia Department of Corrections continues the long-standing practice of notifying ICE when individuals born outside of the United States are in state custody” and that “Virginia state law enforcement agencies also continue to participate in task forces and interagency cooperation with federal agencies.”

They added that “As a former federal law enforcement officer who went after child predators, Gov. Spanberger will always prioritize the safety and well-being of Virginia families.”

Fox News Digital also reached out to the Middle River Regional Jail for comment.

Sean Kennedy, president of Virginians for Safe Communities, told Fox News Digital, “Spanberger’s actions are not pro-immigrant. They are pro-criminal.”

“By shielding dangerous offenders from removal precisely because they are foreign nationals, she is loosing predators onto our streets. In fact, these predators overwhelmingly prey on other innocent immigrants, the ones she claims to be helping,” said Kennedy.

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He accused Spanberger of shielding illegal immigrant criminals from consequences “by blocking ICE at every turn,” saying, “Victims’ faces should haunt the governor when she looks in the mirror.”

“Every murder, rape, and robbery by an illegal alien was preventable if they had never been allowed in and let stay here,” he emphasized, concluding, “They didn’t have to die. She only had to follow the law, not her agenda.”