US prosecutors target healthcare and pandemic scams worth over $1bn
The US Justice Department announced a series of enforcement actions last week, including a healthcare fraud conviction in Florida worth more than $1 billion and multiple cases involving wire fraud.
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The US Justice Department announced a series of enforcement actions last week, including a healthcare fraud conviction in Florida worth more than $1 billion and multiple cases involving wire fraud.
"In the past week, prosecutors throughout the Department secured trial convictions of multiple defendants who ran fraud schemes totaling over a billion dollars,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the National Fraud Enforcement Division.
“I am proud of the fearless men and women of the Fraud Division who are fighting to protect the American people and hold fraudsters accountable.”
For instance, a jury in the Southern District of Florida found the owner of a digital platform HealthSplash guilty of operating a scheme that generated false doctors’ orders and prescriptions. The operation, which defrauded hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, was deemed “one of the most egregious fraud schemes in Florida history”.
The HealthSplash owner ran a telemarketing scheme that allegedly relied on foreign call centers and spam mailers to generate fake doctor orders and help push medically unnecessary equipment through Medicare and other programs.
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Several other cases listed by the DoJ involved wire fraud. In one case, prosecutors charged a woman with stealing more than $75,000 in Social Security and pension benefits. A Danish researcher was also convicted on wire fraud and money laundering charges for allegedly stealing more than $1 million of CDC grant money.
Crypto-related fraud was also recorded. A licensed attorney from the Middle District of Tennessee pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns to evade paying taxes on income from cryptocurrency sales and his consulting business, resulting in a tax loss of more than $550,000.
Many of the cases were linked to pandemic-era fraud schemes. Some people, such as a former employee of the US Department of Labor, pleaded guilty to illegally obtaining funds in pandemic unemployment assistance benefits.
In turn, one man was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison for submitting a fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan application.
Many unemployment fraud schemes during the pandemic relied heavily on online application systems and stolen identities, although the DoJ did not specify those details in the listed cases.
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