From the Willamette (OREGON) Weekly
When FBI special agent Ted Price peered through the window of a dingy
brick storefront on Southwest Morrison Street in March, it was what he
didn’t see that caught his attention.
The business, called UnimedCorner, claimed to provide ailing
seniors with orthotics—braces and other devices to correct foot, joint
and back problems.
Price and other federal investigators were skeptical.
On Unimed’s showroom floor, Price saw wheelchairs, motorized scooters,
a variety of canes and, on the walls, a selection of amateurish
paintings and framed photographs. There was no evidence, however, of
the kinds of equipment for which Unimed had billed Medicare nearly $2
million in the previous couple of months.
“I observed wheelchairs and canes through the window but
did not see any orthotics in the store,” Price later wrote in a
search-warrant affidavit. “It is a sign of fraud that the store is not
stocking the items [for which] it is billing.”
By the time Price arrived on the scene, the company’s
owner, a shadowy Russian immigrant named Alexandr Shcherbakov, was long
gone.
Today, Shcherbakov’s store sits undisturbed. The message
light on the phone blinks, dead potted plants droop and a stuffed toy
monkey slumps in a glass display case.
And behind the cash register hangs a framed poster of television’s best-known mobsters, the Sopranos.
From interviews and information presented in federal affidavits, it is
clear Shcherbakov moved to Oregon to commit a crime elegant and
lucrative enough to make Tony Soprano envious: medical identity theft.
Joe Boyer, Price’s boss and the FBI’s senior local
white-collar crime agent, stops short of saying the Russian mob is
invading the state. But he says the crimes alleged are different from
those typically committed here.
“What we haven’t seen in Oregon before is an effort that
appears to be this well organized and from outside the area,” Boyer
says.
The ease with which Shcherbakov and at least one other Russian in
Portland bilked the feds illustrates in part why healthcare costs are
soaring.
“Medical identity theft is the new frontier for organized
crime,” says Alex Johnson, a former FBI agent who investigates fraud
for Regence BlueShield. “Pretty much anybody can set up a mom-and-pop
operation and start cranking out claims.”
Someday, most Americans will need a cane, wheelchair, home
hospital bed or another of the items healthcare professionals call
“durable medical equipment,” or DME.
For those over 64 and without private insurance, there’s a
good chance federally funded Medicare will pick up the tab for that
equipment. Last year, according to federal statistics, Medicare spent
$8.6 billion on DME.
Here’s the way the system is supposed to work: A doctor
prescribes a device such as a wheelchair for a patient, who presents
his prescription to a DME supplier. The supplier provides the equipment
and bills Medicare, which typically pays 80 percent of the cost.
Unlike pharmacists, who fill prescriptions under strict
scrutiny of state and federal watchdogs, DME suppliers are lightly
regulated....
Like the owner of Unimed, the owner of Quickmed, a young Russian named Amiran A. Abukov, was long gone.
“Abukov left the U.S. for the [former] Soviet Union in late December
2007,” Bonn later wrote in a seizure warrant affidavit.
Abukov and Shcherbakov not only possessed clean records,
they left little trace. Public records searches yielded no home
addresses, parking tickets, phone numbers or any of the usual
fingerprints that law-abiding citizens leave behind. The phone numbers
on their business licenses have been disconnected, and neither
responded to emails.
(A Washington DMV official confirmed Abukov holds a current
commercial driver’s license, but would not provide his date of birth or
any other information. Public records show he briefly lived in Renton,
Wash., in 2007.)
“They are Russian citizens,” says the FBI’s Boyer. “They
came here on student/work visas. They entered the country legally, but
while here they ended up as the founders of shell companies that are
defrauding Medicare.”
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