Authors of Genetic Testing Conspiracy Jailed for Preying on Seniors

Case: It’s off to jail for the ringleaders of a conspiracy to bill Medicare for $430K worth of genetic tests. The leading defendant, a lab sales rep, posed as a representative of The Good Samaritans of America to get access to senior citizens living in low-income housing communities and used fear tactics to persuade them to submit to genetic testing suggesting that they’d get heart attacks, stroke and cancer if they weren’t tested. The defendant recruited providers on Craigslist and paid them thousands of dollars per month to sign requisition forms ordering tests for patients they never actually saw. He and his co-conspirators in turn received over $100K in commission payments from the labs which they divided among themselves. Significance: The sentence was stiff: 50 months in prison, three years of supervised release, $434,963 in restitution and forfeiture of another $66,844. Two weeks later, another of the co-conspirators was sentenced to 19 months and a third to 13 months in prison.