Chicago-area convenience store operator Hassan Abdellatif was sentenced to four years in federal prison and ordered to pay over $8.8 million after a jury found he and associates ran an extensive scheme that fraudulently redeemed WIC checks over nearly a decade.
A federal judge handed down a four-year prison term to the owner of multiple convenience stores in the Chicago area after jurors convicted him on charges tied to a long-running scheme to exploit a federal nutrition program. The case centers on the Women, Infants, and Children (“WIC”) program, which provides food assistance to low-income children and pregnant, breastfeeding, and post-partum women. U.S. District Judge Jorge L. Alonso also ordered more than $8.8 million in restitution to compensate the government. The sentence reflects criminal findings reached at trial and the losses attributed to the operation.
The scheme unfolded over the years 2010 through 2018, according to the court record, and involved a group of convenience store owners and employees operating in the Chicago region. Prosecutors say Abdellatif worked with eight other owners or workers to fraudulently redeem WIC checks at multiple retail locations. In total, ten stores tied to the conduct are reported to have redeemed more than $19 million in WIC benefits, turning a federally funded safety-net program into a cash flow for ineligible purchases.
Investigators described a pattern in which the stores accepted WIC checks as payment for goods that were not approved under the program or at prices that were inflated to channel funds out of the system. Customers were permitted to hand over WIC checks to buy items outside the program’s authorized list, and those checks were processed as if the purchases qualified. Federal charges centered on those deceptive redemptions and the deliberate misuse of program benefits, rather than isolated billing errors or paperwork mistakes.
A jury last year convicted Abdellatif, 37, of Chicago, on five counts: two counts of wire fraud, one count of fraudulently obtaining government benefits, and two counts of willfully failing to file corporate tax returns. Along with the prison term, the restitution order responds to the financial scale prosecutors attributed to the scheme. Eight co-defendants were charged as part of the investigation; each has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, according to the public filings.
In the government’s sentencing memorandum, AUSA Raman stated, “Hassan Abdellatif and his co-schemers engaged in conduct that was extremely serious, complex, and wide-ranging in scope,” reinforcing prosecutors’ view that the operation harmed vulnerable communities that rely on public assistance. The announcement of the sentence listed several federal officials who were involved in or responsible for the investigation’s public disclosure: Andrew S. Boutros, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois; Douglas S. DePodesta, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Field Office of the FBI; Shantel R. Robinson, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Midwest Regional Office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General; and Adam Jobes, Special Agent-in-Charge of IRS Criminal Investigation in Chicago. The government’s legal team included Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kartik K. Raman and Rick Young.
The criminal case illustrates how program integrity work crosses multiple agencies when federal benefits are diverted or misused, and it shows the kinds of charges prosecutors bring when alleged fraud involves both criminal deception and failures in tax reporting. Court documents and the jury verdict focused on transactional evidence from the stores and records of benefit redemptions, tying the business operations to the unlawful scheme. Sentencing now closes one phase for the lead defendant while other participants proceed toward their own resolutions in federal court.
