ARS TECHNICA – The co-owner of a Chicago-based lab has pleaded guilty for his role in a COVID testing scam that raked in millions—which he used to buy stocks, cryptocurrency, and several luxury cars while still squirreling away over $6 million in his personal bank account.
Zishan Alvi, 45, of Inverness, Illinois, co-owned LabElite, which federal prosecutors say billed the federal government for COVID-19 tests that were either never performed or were performed with purposefully inadequate components to render them futile.
Customers who sought testing from LabElite—sometimes for clearance to travel or have contact with vulnerable people—received either no results or results indicating they were negative for the deadly virus.
The scam, which ran from around February 2021 to about February 2022, made over $83 million total in fraudulent payments from the federal government’s Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which covered the cost of COVID-19 testing for people without insurance during the height of the pandemic.
Local media coverage indicated that people who sought testing at LabElite were discouraged from providing health insurance information … READ MORE.
Lab Owner Pleads Guilty to $14M COVID-19 Fraud Scheme
Monday, September 30, 2024
For Immediate Release
Office of Public Affairs
An Illinois man pleaded guilty today for his role in a COVID-19 testing fraud scheme.
According to court documents, Zishan Alvi, 45, of Inverness, owned and operated a laboratory in Chicago that performed testing for COVID-19. From February 2021 through February 2022, Alvi caused claims to be submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for COVID-19 tests that were not performed as billed.
As part of the scheme, the laboratory released negative COVID-19 test results to patients, even though the laboratory either had not actually tested the specimens or the results were inconclusive.
Alvi knew that the laboratory was releasing negative results for tests that were not performed or were inconclusive, but still caused the laboratory to submit claims to HRSA for those tests. HRSA paid the laboratory over $14 million as a result of the fraudulent claims Alvi caused to be submitted to HRSA.
Alvi pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 7, 2025, and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; Acting U.S. Attorney Morris Pasqual for the Northern District of Illinois; Assistant Director Chad Yarbrough of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division; and Special Agent in Charge Mario Pinto of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) made the announcement.
The FBI and HHS-OIG are investigating the case.
Trial Attorney Claire T. Sobczak of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jared Hasten and Misty Wright for the Northern District of Illinois are prosecuting the case.
The Fraud Section leads the Criminal Division’s efforts to combat health care fraud through the Health Care Fraud Strike Force Program. Since March 2007, this program, currently comprised of nine strike forces operating in 27 federal districts, has charged more than 5,400 defendants who collectively have billed federal health care programs and private insurers more than $27 billion.
In addition, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with HHS-OIG, are taking steps to hold providers accountable for their involvement in health care fraud schemes.
More information can be found at www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/health-care-fraud-unit.
