The U.S. Department of Justice announced charges against 10 defendants in multiple states in connection with multiple business email compromise (BEC), money laundering, and wire fraud schemes that targeted Medicare, state Medicaid programs, private health insurers, and numerous other victims and resulted in more than $11.1 million in total losses.
The charges stem primarily from BEC schemes in which individuals posing as business partners are alleged to have fraudulently diverted money from victims’ bank accounts into accounts they or co-conspirators controlled (sometimes through the use of recruited “money mules”) by using spoofed email addresses, bank account takeovers, and similar fraudulent methods designed to deceive victims into believing they were making legitimate payments.
The prosecution’s announcement includes alleged schemes that fraudulently diverted payments intended for hospitals to provide medical services to patients. For example, fraudulent emails from accounts resembling those associated with actual hospitals were allegedly sent to public and private health insurance programs requesting that future reimbursements be sent to new bank accounts that did not belong to the hospitals. Unwittingly, five state Medicaid programs, two Medicare Administrative Contractors, and two private health insurers allegedly were deceived into making payments to the defendants and their co-conspirators instead of depositing the reimbursement payments into bank…
