A Georgia man was arrested by FBI agents Monday and charged with accepting kickbacks from medical testing companies for steering people to get coronavirus tests when they didn't need them and then collecting Medicare reimbursement.
According to court documents, Erik Santos, 49, of Braselton, Georgia, was allegedly involved in a scheme to defraud the government, reports NBC News. Prosecutors commented that he was already getting the kickbacks for unnecessary cancer screenings.
Santos was running a marketing company that generated the leads, and authorities were already looking into claims that he was getting kickbacks for the cancer screenings, but he also started to add the COVID-19 tests to the mix.
His goal was "to specifically target Medicare beneficiaries who were not exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 or were otherwise unlikely to test positive for the virus," said the court. Information about Santos' lawyer was not immediately available.
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Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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