FBI Tracks Down Its Most Wanted Food Stamp Fraud Fugitive Halfway Around the World

Kash Patel's FBI just made its fifth arrest in three months off Vice President JD Vance's most wanted fraudster list.

One name on that list belonged to a Tacoma grocery store owner accused of running a massive food stamp scam.

Federal agents just tracked him down on the other side of the planet.

Grocery Store Owner Turned $600,000 in Food Stamps Into Cash for Himself

Manjit Singh Bedi ran the Asian Grocery Store in Tacoma, Washington.

Federal prosecutors say Bedi turned that store counter into a criminal cash machine.

From March 2024 through June 2025, Bedi allegedly ran customers' benefit cards through his register as though they had bought groceries, then paid them cash out of the till instead.

Every swipe, he skimmed fifty cents on the dollar for himself.

Load $200 onto a card, and the recipient walked out with $100 while Bedi kept the other hundred.

Prosecutors say the scheme drained at least $600,000 in taxpayer-funded food benefits.

The USDA Office of Inspector General and Washington State's Department of Social and Health Services helped build the case against him.

A federal grand jury indicted Bedi in April 2026 on wire fraud and SNAP fraud charges.

Instead of facing a jury, Bedi bolted.

He blew through his release conditions, crossed into Canada, and kept running until he landed in India.

A federal warrant for his arrest went out on May 21, 2026, and the FBI slapped a $150,000 bounty on his head.

Punjab Police Ran Him Down in Jalandhar

Bedi thought he found a hiding spot on the other side of the globe.

He was wrong.

Punjab Police arrested him in Jalandhar on Friday, working alongside American investigators who never stopped hunting him.

Local authorities also hit Bedi with separate Indian charges, meaning he cannot even claim the trip was worth it.

FBI Director Kash Patel wasted no time taking a victory lap.

"Five Most Wanted Fraudsters captured in just three months is a historic success for this initiative," Patel said.

"The days of taking advantage of American taxpayers without consequence are over," he added.

Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald made sure nobody missed the message.

"As this arrest in India shows, the Justice Department's reach extends to every corner of the planet," McDonald said.

U.S. authorities are now working to extradite Bedi to face the charges he ran from.

If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison and a quarter-million dollars in fines on every single count.

Bedi Is the Fifth Fraudster Patel's Most Wanted List Has Dragged Home

Bedi is not some outlier.

He is the fifth man run down since Patel and Vance launched the Most Wanted Fraudsters list back in June.

Together, those five suspects are accused of stealing more than $2 billion combined and spent nearly 4,000 days on the run before agents caught up with them.

The first man on that list, Said Abdullahi Ereg, surrendered within a week of being named after allegedly stealing $4 million from a federal child nutrition program during the pandemic.

That is not a coincidence.

It proves something conservatives have said for years: the swamp does not police itself, you have to hunt it.

For four years, Biden's USDA rubber-stamped SNAP retailers from Tacoma grocery counters to the pandemic-era nutrition program Ereg allegedly looted.

Bedi's store got approved to accept SNAP benefits in February 2024, back when Biden's USDA still treated food stamp fraud like a rounding error.

It took a new FBI director and a vice president willing to put faces and dollar amounts on a public list to actually chase these people down, including onto foreign soil.

That is the difference between a government that manages fraud and a government that hunts it.

Bedi turned out to be one of three fugitives the FBI added to the Most Wanted Fraudsters list on September 3.

The other two, Onur Simsek and Bernhard Eugen Fritsch, joined him on the list just a day before Punjab Police caught up with him.

Patel and Vance are not slowing down, and every name added is a warning shot to the next grifter thinking a plane ticket buys them a clean escape.

This hunt is nowhere close to finished.

Sources:

• Fox News Staff, "EXCLUSIVE: FBI's Fifth Most Wanted Fraudster Captured After Alleged SNAP Scam Suspect Arrested in India," Fox News, September 5, 2026.
• Slay News Staff, "FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Accused of Stealing $600,000 from U.S. Taxpayers Captured in India," Slay News, September 8, 2026.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Statement from FBI Director Patel on Most Wanted Fraudster Arrest," FBI.gov, June 2026.
• Staff, "FBI Top 10 Most Wanted Fraudsters List Unveiled by Kash Patel," Lynnwood Times, June 4, 2026.
• The Heritage Foundation, "Stamping Out Food Stamp Fraud," The Heritage Foundation.