Luis Lacerda, 37, was sentenced to three years and five months in prison; Omar Solari, 36, was sentenced to two years and six months; Michael Murphy, 38, was sentenced to 15 months; and Joelson Viveros, 45, was sentenced to five years of probation for their roles in a $54.3 million Medicare fraud scheme, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida announced today.
The department forced Lacerda to give up $15.6 million and pay $54.3 million in restitution. Solari must lose $6.3 million and pay $36.2 million; Murphy, $3.6 million and $8.3 million; and Viveros, $894,116 and $3 million, according to the department.
According to the department, between 2018 and 2021, the co-conspirators paid kickbacks and bribes to telemarketing companies in order to recruit Medicare beneficiaries and encourage them to take prescriptions for drugs, especially topical creams, that they did not desire or need.
According to the government, several of the conspirators ran their own telemarketing companies, which they used to obtain leads from Medicare recipients.
They then paid bribes to telemedicine businesses that hired or contracted with physicians to write prescriptions, according to the department.
According to the agency, these physicians rarely had a physician-patient connection with the beneficiaries, often writing prescriptions after brief phone calls or without contact.
According to the agency, the defendants submitted claims for medically inappropriate drugs through pharmacies they owned or controlled, using Medicare beneficiary information and signed prescriptions.
The agency stated that in some situations, they “recycled” claims among different pharmacies in order to increase payouts.
The fraud led to over $54.3 million in reimbursements to the defendants’ pharmacies for prescriptions that were not medically necessary, the agency confirmed.