The Justice Department on Wednesday announced criminal charges against 21 people who allegedly schemed to defraud the government of Covid-19 relief money and other pandemic-related scams, including offering fake cures, selling fake vaccination cards, engaging in sham telemedicine visits, providing counterfeit negative test results to travelers and submitting claims for unnecessary medical tests.
Officials said the cases — spanning California, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Utah and Washington — totaled more than $149 billion in fraudulent billings and theft from Medicare and other federal programs.
In the largest such case, the owners and operators of a clinical laboratory in California were indicted on charges related to their roles in an alleged scheme to defraud Medicare of more than $214 million for unnecessary lab tests, including $144 million in fraudulent Covid-19 tests.
“The charges brought in nine separate federal court cases are part of a broader effort by a Justice Department task force aimed at what Kenneth Polite, assistant attorney general for the criminal division, said is ‘rooting out schemes that have exploited the pandemic,’" CNN’s Evan Perez reports.
