Indian national pleads guilty to $227-million medicare fraud in US over fake Covid-19 test kit claims

An Indian national has pleaded guilty in the US to two counts of health care fraud for his role in a $227 million scheme that used the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries to submit false claims for COVID-19 test kits.Syed Murtuza Kablazada, 36, who lived in Des Plaines, Illinois, caused three Chicago-area laboratories to bill Medicare for test kits that beneficiaries had neither requested nor received, according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ).Court documents show that Kablazada and his co-conspirators acquired three laboratories, Chicago Care, V Care and Al-Ameer, over six months beginning in January 2023.They then paid approximately $11 million to a telemarketing company based in Pakistan to obtain personally identifiable information belonging to hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries. The information was used to submit fraudulent claims worth $227 million for COVID-19 test kits.Medicare paid approximately $136 million against those claims, although the kits were never requested by or shipped to the beneficiaries, the DOJ said.Investigators said Kablazada and his associates used overseas money transfers and unlicensed money transmitters to conceal their involvement and distribute the proceeds. Some of the money was used to purchase luxury vehicles.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.