Healthcare fraud costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every year. With the widespread coronavirus pandemic, it is expected that much of the fraud in 2020 will be related to the COVID-19 crisis.
But what will COVID-19 fraud look like?
This spring, the United States Department of Justice put out a press release encouraging people to pass on any information they have about COVID-19 scams to the National Center for Disease Fraud (NCDF). As of late March, federal authorities had already announced their first enforcement actions, which involved shutting down the operation of a website that sold fake “vaccine kits” for the COVID-19 virus.
Several days later, the New Jersey branch of the FBI submitted a criminal complaint against a person who was promoting fraudulent COVID-19 test kits, violating the Federal Anti-Kickback Act and committing healthcare fraud, both of which are considered felonies with a strong likelihood of imprisonment.
With these early cases in mind, as well as what we’ve seen transpire since then, these are some of the red flags that could indicate forms of COVID-19 fraud:
For more information about the steps you should take if you believe you’ve come across an instance of COVID-19-related fraud, contact an experienced whistleblower lawyer at Kardell Law Group.