Corstin helps “Big Balls” Edward with his now-viral scam videos

Nick Shirley – right-winger The content creator whose YouTube investigation led to the Trump administration’s anti-immigration crackdown in Minnesota claims that his latest video about alleged fraud in California was backed by data provided by Edward Corustin, one of the first members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) known online as the “Big Balls.”

Coristin joined DOGE when she was 19 years old with no prior government experience, having worked at several agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Before joining DOGE, Coristin worked at Elon Musk’s Neuralink company for several months and founded a startup known for hiring black hat hackers.

In an interview with Coristine posted to Shirley’s YouTube channel on Thursday, Shirley alleged that Coristine personally pulled data on Medicaid spending for businesses based in California as potential targets. Corstin nodded, telling Shirley that the government should create more opportunities for mass investigations into fraud.

The information Coristen allegedly pulled for Shirley was from a data set published by the DOGE team at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February. In a letter to The post also claimed that the data set could be used to “uncover” large-scale fraud.

“Then, I went to California based on the data set you helped me extract, and these scammers also didn’t try to hide it,” Shirley told Coristen in an interview Thursday.

With open source data on government spending, gatekeeper investigators like Shirley who are “in a better position” can uncover fraudulent payments, Koristin said. “You’re someone who actually went to the places where we were spending all this money and confronted the people and learned the truth,” Kuristen said. “I think we just have to create more opportunities to make that happen. We have to continue to open source the data.”

The intersection of the right’s favorite fraud influencer and one of DOGE’s most famous architects embodies the next evolution of DOGE and the Trump administration’s fight against “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Shirley’s videos have become major evidence of the Trump administration’s immigration fraud and crackdowns. When Shirley released his video in December in which he claimed to have exposed more than $100 million in child welfare scams run by Somalis in Minnesota, figures like Vice President J.D. Vance joined in. A large number of immigration agents were then sent to Minnesota, leading to mass arrests, detentions, and the deaths of two protesters, Rene Judd and Alex Peretti.

Early in their YouTube video, Shirley and Kuristen directly link fraud to immigrant and foreign communities. “A lot of money is being stolen and smuggled out of the country,” Coristine says, without providing any evidence. “Once that money gets into the suitcase to Somalia, it never comes back,” Shirley answers.

Later in the video, Shirley and Kuristen cite specific examples of “waste and fraud” identified by DOGE, including funding a “Sesame Street-style children’s TV show in Iraq” and “tax policy consulting in Liberia.” Both programs were supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which DOGE effectively shut down in the first months of 2025. Kuristen also claimed that the SBA “did a terrible job,” especially with loans during the height of the coronavirus, and that there were “absolutely no checks on who receives the money, not even the simplest checks, if [a Social Security number] TRUE.”