Ten people from Broward and Palm Beach counties used three call centers and three laboratories to fool doctors and rip off $53 million from Medicare. And, now, all 10 reside in the federal prison system.
West Palm Beach’s Jose Goyos became the last of the economic gang to be sentenced to prison in December, getting 15 years on attempt and conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering. Goyos will serve those sentences, the group’s second longest, concurrently.
Daniel M. Carver, 38, of Boca Raton got the longest sentence of the group, 16 years and eight months, after pleading guilty to attempt and conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Carver owned the call centers and Medicare-enrolled clinical labs used in the scam.
The rest of the group and their sentences, in alphabetical order:
— Boca Raton’s Louis “Gino” Carver, 33, two years and eight months.
— North Lauderdale’s Ashley Cigarroa, 32, two years and six months.
— Palm Beach’s Thomas Dougherty, 42, 14 years.
— Parkland’s John Paul Gosney Jr., 42, seven years and 11 months.
— Boynton Beach’s Ethan Macier, 25, three years and nine months.
— Lantana’s Timothy Richardson, 31, two years.
— Hollywood’s Galina Rozenberg, 42, four years.
— Hollywood’s Michael Rozenberg, 61, four years.
Fooling doctors on the phone
Daniel Carver’s guilty plea described the layers of lies the group used from January 2020 to July 2021. Carver owned Boca Raton’s DMC Group Holding, Royal Palm Beach’s Broad Street Lifestyles and Olympus First Consulting call centers and clinical labs Cergena Laboratories, Theregene Diagnostics, and North Miami Beach’s Progenix Lab.
The call centers “conducted, deceptive telemarketing campaigns targeting Medicare beneficiaries in an effort to obtain their consent to order durable medical equipment (“DME”) or genetic testing,” Carver’s admission of facts said.
Goyos ran the “doctor chase” part of the call centers. Prosecutors’ sentencing investigation report said Goyos wrote the doctor chase manual, including the lies to be told by his telemarketing staff.
“Most notably, the doctor chase telemarketers lied to medical providers by claiming Medicare beneficiaries were ‘mutual patients’ and that these patients wanted these tests,” the investigation said. “Additionally, [Goyos] was involved in the creation of a website for a front company (Gentec Solutions), which was used to provide medical providers with a false sense of security that they were dealing with a legitimate medical provider as opposed to a call center.”
Doctors believed “Gentec” treated the patients.
“Carver, Dougherty and others used Broad Street to pay kickbacks to telemedicine companies to obtain signed doctors’ orders for DME and genetic tests that were not medically necessary.” Then, the gang got illegal kickbacks and bribes from labs, DME companies and marketing companies for the signed doctors’ orders.
All this allowed them to submit $67,422,579 in fraudulent claims to Medicare for unnecessary laboratory services, of which Medicare paid $53,051,391.
The case was investigated by the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General. The prosecution was handled by Criminal Division’s Fraud Section’s Reginald Cuyler, Andrew Tamayo and Patrick J. Queenan.
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