An Indian-origin man in the US has been charged with allegedly submitting $66.2 million in bogus claims for COVID-19 tests that were never conducted, US Department of Justice said.Rajesh “Raj” Patel, 52, of Schaumburg, Illinois, faces five counts of wire fraud over an alleged scheme involving at least 380,000 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests between May 2021 and April 2022. Prosecutors allege that Patel generated fake negative test results and used them to claim payments from a federal programme for uninsured people.Patel was co-owner and chief operating officer of a clinical laboratory in Hillside, Illinois, that processed PCR tests during the pandemic. According to court documents, the laboratory agreed with Meridian Medical Staffing Inc. in March 2021, paying the company tens of millions of dollars to collect samples and provide biological information about purported patients.Investigators allege many of these patients either did not exist or had never provided samples to Meridian. Despite this, Patel created negative results for at least 380,000 tests that the laboratory had not performed.The laboratory used those results to bill the US Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Uninsured Program, which covered COVID-19 testing for people without health insurance during the pandemic. It submitted about $66.2 million in claims and received approximately $44.1 million in payments, prosecutors said. Patel obtained around $28 million from the...
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stressed earlier this year she would be cracking down on auto insurance fraud statewide. Several months later, her office has announced more than a dozen related arrests.