19 Charged for Allegedly Defrauding Medicaid, Getting Paid While in Prison, Vacationing, or Dead

At times when Pennsylvania home healthcare aides were supposed to be helping people, they instead were “hospitalized, working at other jobs, and even in jail,” Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald told reporters Aug. 4 in Philadelphia.

Often, the aides worked with co-conspirators who would bill Medicaid for services that were never rendered, he said, announcing 19 defendants were charged in the latest “fraud takedown.”

The new cases involve alleged home-healthcare schemes that netted in excess of $4 million, said McDonald, who heads the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division. The cases were brought as a result of cooperation among multiple federal and state law-enforcement agencies.

McDonald also announced that his agency’s Northeast Healthcare Strike Force is expanding to Philadelphia, to “place dedicated fraud prosecutors right here to further root out the fraud in Pennsylvania.”

Investigations revealed blatant patterns of deliberate conduct, not honest mistakes, he and other officials said.

For example, a healthcare company “billed for an aide that was dead—600 clock-ins in a year, to the tune of a total of $225,000 in Medicaid billings,” U.S. Attorney David Metcalf said, adding that other aides claimed to be working “while jet-setting across the Caribbean and Europe.”

McDonald also noted a case that intertwined several alleged fraudsters in the same family.

Conspirators claimed work hours for their son during a timeframe when police were citing him for marijuana possession. On another occasion, that same aide “billed Medicaid for a full day of in-home care for his father … [while] the father was not home at all; he was in a courtroom—watching a different relative get sentenced for defrauding this same program.”

After widespread Medicaid fraud drew national attention in Minnesota late last year, President Donald Trump launched various fraud-fighting measures. He appointed Vice President JD Vance to head an anti-fraud task force. He also created McDonald’s new fraud-focused division in the Justice Department.

Those efforts have started only recently but are paying off, said Scott Brady, executive director of the White House Fraud Task Force.

“We’ve already stopped tens of billions of dollars in fraud, and we’ve already indicted and convicted hundreds of fraudsters,” he said, noting he is among native Pennsylvanians who consider it “personal” to fight fraud in the Keystone State.

McDonald said the home healthcare program helps honest Americans receive care with dignity, “from those they trust the most.” But when “deceitful opportunists” take advantage of it, the program “becomes a money tree, a gravy train for criminal fraudsters.”

“The era of getting rich off the backs of our programs for our sick, elderly, and disabled is over,” McDonald said.

‘Everybody Is Doing This’

Metcalf highlighted the case of Sean Murray, who was being held on prior federal drug charges in the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. The prison is adjacent to the federal building where officials were speaking to reporters, Metcalf and other speakers noted.

Murray, 58, was indicted on one count of healthcare fraud and nine counts of wire fraud.

Instead of providing healthcare services, as claimed, he was elsewhere, Metcalf said.

“He was at the gym. He was at the massage parlor. He was on a cruise, and at worst, he was packaging narcotics to run his drug trafficking operation,” the prosecutor said, adding, “In a jail call that was recorded in August 2024, Sean Murray boasted about how easy of a racket it was.”

The Epoch Times was unable to immediately reach Murray’s lawyer, Gina Amoriello, for comment.

The case against Philadelphia-based Benevolent Home Health Care, the company whose founders allegedly billed for the deceased healthcare aide, was tied to an alleged drug trafficker, Metcalf said.

The drug suspect is married to one of the company’s founders, Metcalf said. During a drug raid, the husband purportedly stated, “Hold on, I need to clock out of my shift.”

“And when the agents asked what he meant by that, he said, ‘Everybody is doing this. If that’s a problem, you’d have to arrest the whole city,’” referring to healthcare-billing schemes, said Metcalf. “That is shocking, and it illustrates the extent of the problem that we’re dealing with here: ‘Everybody is doing this.’”

The Epoch Times received no immediate response to a phone message left for Benevolent; the drug suspect allegedly tied to the company was identified only as “Miss Williams’s husband” during the news conference and in a subsequent news release.

Then, “While this man was in the prison behind me, the company and Miss Williams billed him for home care services … a federally charged narcotics trafficker, literally sitting behind bars in the federal detention center, was still being billed for home care services,” Metcalf said.

Such brazen fraud cases “make a mockery of your tax dollars,” Metcalf said, but said, “it ends today.”

“If ‘everybody is doing it,’ it takes everyone to stop it,” he said. “This is going to take the total force of the United States government and our state partners.”

Beyond Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday called defendant Ashley Griffin “quite the magician” and said sarcastically that she “had some very ‘productive’ days.”

A personal care attendant for 13 different agencies in several counties, Griffin claimed to have worked “more than 24 hours in a single day—more than 1,000 times … and, for one day, she submitted 126 hours of work,” Sunday said.

During more than three years, she claimed more than 64,000 work hours “for services that she absolutely could not have possibly done,” Sunday alleged, amounting to Medicaid payments of more than $1.2 million.

The Epoch Times was unable to immediately identify an attorney who might offer comment on behalf of Griffin, 27.

“These [cases] might be half-comical, if they weren’t unbelievably serious criminal acts causing a tremendous amount of harm,” Sunday said, calling the cases a public health threat. In the past, some Medicaid patients have died after failing to receive the help they needed.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said: “These fraudsters are stealing our trust, and that’s a much more difficult thing to replace.”

The doctor said he diagnosed a deeper pathology too: “This is not fraud, waste, and abuse by itself. This is corruption.”

“When ‘everyone is doing it,’ which is maybe the most important quote from this press conference,” the implication is that “if you’re not part of the corrupt system, you’re a fool,” Oz said. “That’s how countries collapse.”