Home Health & Hospice Week

Ill-gotten gains went to real estate and cars, feds allege.

The feds’ battle against hospice fraud in California continues, with the latest case involving five individuals and $15 million in fraud proceeds.

Authorities have arrested Petros Fichidzhyan, Juan Carlos Esparza, and Karpis Srapyan. The three “allegedly operated a series of sham hospice companies that were purportedly owned by foreign nationals but were in fact owned by the three defendants,” the Department of Justice says in a release. They used the foreign nationals’ identifying information to open bank accounts, to sign property leases, and to make phone calls to Medicare, and submitted false claims to Medicare for hospice services, the DOJ continues.

Plus: “The defendants misappropriated the identifying information of doctors, claiming to Medicare that the doctors had determined hospice services were necessary, when in fact the purported recipients of these hospice services were not terminally ill and had never requested nor received care from the sham hospices,” the DOJ accuses. In some cases, the same beneficiary purportedly received services from multiple sham hospices.

Fichidzhyan, Esparza, and Srapyan, together with defendants Susanna Harutyunyan and Mihran Panosyan, “allegedly laundered the proceeds fraudulently obtained from Medicare” and “spent the money on real estate and vehicles, among other things,” the DOJ adds.

The charges in the case “are the most recent in the Justice Department’s ongoing effort to combat hospice fraud in the greater Los Angeles area,” it says in the release.