Medical Biller Sentenced to 10 Years Imprisonment for Medicare Fraud Scheme
MIAMI – R. Alexander Acosta, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and Jonathan I. Solomon, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami Field Office, announced that defendant Diana Sotto, an owner of All Medical Billing Solutions Inc., a medical billing company, was sentenced on Jan. 31, by United States District Court Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga to 121 months’ imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release. Judge Altonaga also set a hearing to determine the amount of restitution to be ordered in the case.
On Oct. 2, 2006, Sotto was convicted by a Miami jury on three counts of a Superseding Indictment that charged her with conspiracies to defraud Medicare, pay health care kickbacks, and launder health care fraud proceeds.
According to the evidence at trial, a Miami medical clinic, Project New Hope, defrauded Medicare of more than $2.8 million between Sept. 2004 and Sept. 2005. The clinic claimed to specialize in the treatment of HIV patients. The patients who attended the clinics were, in fact, HIV positive. The clinic fraudulently billed Medicare for dosages of expensive HIV medications, including Neupogen, Procrit, Acthar, and Fuzeon. The evidence at trial showed that most patients did not receive the medication for which Medicare was billed. In addition, the evidence showed that clinic personnel paid kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries to induce them to attend the clinic.
The evidence at trial also showed that Sotto’s company, All Medical Billing, submitted the fraudulent Project New Hope claims to Medicare and that Sotto received more than $600,000 in fraud proceeds, the majority of which she laundered through five shell corporations.
Five of Sotto’s co-defendants pleaded guilty before trial to various charges in the same case. These defendants were Luis Manuel Fernandez, Maria Loriga, Beatriz Fernandez, Manuel Ivan Perez, and Walter Lefurge. A sixth co-defendant, Sandra Galvez, was convicted by the same jury that convicted Sotto.
Judge Altonaga previously sentenced Luis Manuel Fernandez to 78 months imprisonment; Maria Loriga to 46 months imprisonment; Beatriz Fernandez to 18 months imprisonment; Manuel Ivan Perez to 35 months imprisonment; Walter Lefurge to 3 years probation; and Sandra Galvez to 73 months imprisonment.
Acosta commended the investigative efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the cases involving purported HIV infusion clinics in the Southern District of Florida. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Marc Osborne and Jeffrey Marcus.
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A copy of this press release may be found on the website of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida at www.usdoj.gov/usao/fls. Related court documents and information may be found on the website of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida at www.flsd.uscourts.gov or on http://pacer.flsd.uscourts.gov.
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