Tag: fraud

U.S. Marshals RAID Home of Former Republican Lobbyist Jim Courtovich

U.S. Marshals raided the upscale home of former Republican lobbyist Jim Courtovich, enforcing a federal court order tied to a $4 million judgment stemming from allegations of financial misconduct.

Courtovich, the founder of Sphere Consulting and a fixture on the K Street party circuit, once rubbed elbows with media elites and GOP heavyweights.

During the 2016 Republican primary, Courtovich supported Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s main rivals. He reportedly did not vote in the 2016 general election.

According to a report from The New York Times and journalist Brody Mullins, a team of armed federal agents arrived at Courtovich’s multimillion-dollar residence near Kalorama just before 10 a.m., loudly announcing their presence and warning they were prepared to forcibly enter if necessary.

The raid enforces a federal court judgment ordering him to repay $4 million-plus, in what Saudi-backed investors claim was a brazen breach of contract and outright fraud.

“US Marshals this morning raided the home of Jim Courtovich, the once-high flying Republican lobbyist & fixer.
Saudi & other business partners had won a judgment against him for stealing $4m, & the raid was an effort to collect, reports Brody Mullins, who was on the scene & has a lively dispatch in his new Influence newsletter.”

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O’Keefe Media Group: California’s Top Controller Communications Official Admits Audits “Are Not Getting Done”

The O’Keefe Media Group on Tuesday released undercover video of California’s top Controller Communications official admitting that audits “are not getting done” while acknowledging that fraud is rampant in the state.

Bismarck Obando told an undercover O’Keefe Media Group journalist that there is no plan to tackle homelessness.

“Do you feel there’s fraud going on in the state of California?” the OMG journalist asked Obando.

Without skipping a beat he replied, “Everywhere, cities, counties, special districts, hospitals, insurance companies.”

“We just can’t conduct the audits,” Obando told the journalist.

“It’s funny because they haven’t funded us to do those audits…they keep cutting our auditing teams,” he said.

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SoCal: Orange County Man Pleads Guilty to Submitting $270 Million in Fraudulent Claims to Medi-Cal in 11 Months: DOJ

A man in Orange County, California, pleaded guilty to orchestrating a scheme to steal $270 million in bogus Medi-Cal claims in 11 months, the DOJ announced on Tuesday.

“Paul Richard Randall, 66, of Orange, pleaded guilty Monday to one count of wire fraud committed while on release. He has been in federal custody since June 2025,” the DOJ said.

According to federal prosecutors, Randall and others, through a business called Monte Vista Pharmacy, submitted claims for expensive prescription drugs that contained generic ingredients that were “not medically necessary.”

Monte Vista Pharmacy billed Medi-Cal millions of dollars a month after it suspended its requirement that healthcare providers “obtain prior authorization before providing certain health care services or medications as a condition of reimbursement,” the DOJ said.

Medi-Cal suspended the prior authorization as it transitioned to a new payment system.

Of the $270 million that was billed to Medi-Cal, Randall and his co-conspirators received $178 million.

Randall and the other defendants laundered the money by transferring the funds to a third party to pay “kickbacks” to Patricia Anderson, 58, of West Hills.

Randall is facing up to 30 years in federal prison.

“This defendant used a public health program as his personal piggy bank,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli. “This guilty plea should send a message that this administration — consistent with the President’s war on fraud — will not turn a blind eye while criminals fleece taxpayers.”

“Thanks to the leadership of President Donald Trump, the Department, working closely with the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, is supercharging efforts to take down every fraudster and bring them to justice,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“In one day, the Department prosecuted the theft of a half-billion in taxpayer dollars. All those ripping off the American people are on notice,” Blanche added.

“The defendant was a repeat fraudster who caused Medi-Cal, a program designed to help those in need, to be billed nearly $270 million for expensive and medically unnecessary medications,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

“He and his co-schemers stole over $178 million through false and fraudulent claims for these medications, lining their own pockets with public funds. The Criminal Division will aggressively prosecute those who defraud Medicaid and exploit taxpayer-funded benefit programs,” he said.

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California FRAUD SCANDAL Keeps Getting Worse: LA School District Employee Accused of Running $22M Kickback Scheme

The latest corruption case in California’s public education system serves as a warning sign of a deeper structural failure—one that reflects weak oversight, misplaced priorities, and leadership that has consistently failed to enforce accountability.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, a former Los Angeles Unified School District employee is accused of directing $22 million in contracts to a private technology firm in exchange for roughly $3 million in kickbacks. 

Prosecutors have described the scheme as the largest of its kind in the district’s history, involving shell companies, manipulated bidding processes, and deliberate efforts to conceal wrongdoing.

The details are not merely concerning—they are revealing. According to the complaint, the employee allegedly controlled the contract selection process, removed oversight personnel, and coordinated directly with the vendor to ensure favorable outcomes. 

At one point, messages cited by prosecutors indicate explicit awareness of wrongdoing, including instructions to delete communications and avoid detection.

This level of coordination does not occur in a system with strong safeguards. It occurs in a system where oversight mechanisms either fail or can be easily bypassed.

That reality leads to a broader question: how does a scheme of this scale operate for years inside one of the largest school districts in the country without being stopped?

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MORE FRAUD: Colorado Made at Least $77.8 MILLION in Improper Autism Therapy Payments

A new federal audit has identified significant improper payments within Colorado’s Medicaid-funded autism therapy system, adding to a growing pattern of oversight failures in public healthcare spending. 

The findings, released by the Office of Inspector General, focus on Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), one of the most widely used therapies for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

ABA therapy is designed to improve communication, social interaction, and behavioral functioning, and it has become a central component of autism treatment nationwide. 

As demand has increased, so has government spending. In Colorado, fee-for-service Medicaid payments for ABA rose sharply from $60.1 million in 2019 to $163.5 million in 2023. That rapid expansion, however, has not been matched by adequate oversight.

The audit examined Medicaid payments made in 2022 and 2023 and found systemic noncompliance with federal and state requirements. 

Every single one of the 100 sampled enrollee-months reviewed included at least one claim that was either improper or likely improper. That finding alone signals a structural issue rather than isolated billing errors.

Improper payments in this context do not necessarily mean intentional fraud in every instance, but they do indicate that providers billed for services that were not properly documented, not eligible under program rules, or not supported by sufficient clinical justification. 

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Trump Admin Busts Open Gavin Newsom’s $146 BILLION Medi-cal FRAUD Machine

Fox News just laid bare the staggering scale of waste, fraud, and abuse plaguing California’s Medi-Cal program under Governor Gavin Newsom.

In a hard-hitting segment, Kayleigh McEnany highlighted the eye-watering numbers: $146 billion per year lost to fraud in the state’s Medicaid expansion.

“That is slightly more than Warren Buffett’s estimated net worth. It is more than the GDP of several small countries,” McEnany stated.

The revelation comes as the Trump administration ramps up its nationwide assault on entitlement fraud through the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force and aggressive oversight by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Oz didn’t hold back when asked about the bigger picture.

“How big do you think this fraud is nationwide?” McEnany pressed.

“We believe nationwide it’s $100 billion in Medicare and Medicaid,” Oz replied. “If you’re worried about Medicare being there for you… and you’re worried that it’s going to expire… This fraud, getting rid of it, will DOUBLE the life expectancy of the Medicare trust fund.”

He added, “That’s a massive increase in numbers of years of extra Americans can trust that the program will be there for them.”

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Minnesota Judge Hands Somali Fraudster Just 6 Months After $500K Theft in Child Food Scam

A fraudster in the massive “Feeding Our Future” scandal has received just six months in jail after stealing nearly half a million dollars in taxpayer money meant for children.

Zamzam Jama was sentenced to six months behind bars and ordered to repay $491,000 for her role in the scheme.

The sentence was handed down by U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, who was somehow appointed by President Trump back in 2018, one day after a co-conspirator received only a one-year term.

Brasel has previously ruled in favor of mail-in voting and counting ballots days or even weeks after an election has concluded. Mail-in ballots are the most common method that Democrats use to cheat.

The case involves one of the largest fraud operations in recent U.S. history.

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Forget Minnesota – The Amount Of Fraud Uncovered In California Is Staggering

California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.

The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco into no-go zones. And the cost-of-living crisis is pricing middle-class taxpayers out of basic necessities like groceries and gas, even as the state spends billions on welfare programs that never seem to lift anyone out of poverty.

Californians are beginning to ask: Where is all this money going? On paper, it funds hospitals, universities, schools, prisons, infrastructure, and other public services. But beneath the surface, something else is happening that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not want you to see: massive, systematic, brazen fraud.

We conducted interviews with public officials, fraud experts, and political figures, and reviewed hundreds of pages of government reports, state audits, criminal indictments, and other public records on California fraud. From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

Welcome to Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud.

Fourteen months after Newsom began his first term as governor of California, the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world. Roughly 2.7 million Californians eventually lost their jobs. The state’s economy went into freefall as its leaders imposed some of the country’s most restrictive public-health measures. In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

One way to inject money was through California’s massive unemployment insurance program (UI). Unemployment insurance is administered by the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD), which can process billions of dollars in payments monthly. Before the state turned on the cash machine, however, experts had warned that the system was ripe for fraud.

Haywood Talcove, one of America’s leading fraud specialists and CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, was one such expert. “I was begging [federal officials] not to let the money go out like that, because it was going to be the biggest fraud in the history of our country,” he said. “Obviously, I wasn’t successful.”

For many reasons, California was particularly susceptible to the large-scale fraud schemes Haywood Talcove saw on the horizon. Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

“They literally suspended all of the rules for the [unemployment insurance] program,” Talcove said. “[That made] it possible for anyone to get that benefit even if they weren’t entitled to it. It was very intentional. They knew what they were doing. But it caught up to them because it just got so out of control.”

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One of the California Hospices Targeted in Fraud Sting Had a Survival Rate of 97 Percent

One of the hospices targeted in ‘Operation Never Say Die’ today had a survival rate of nearly 100 percent. It’s amazing that these people got away with this for as long as they did.

People check into hospices to die. It’s extremely rare that someone leaves on their feet. At this place, 97 percent of the patients lived. That is a statistical impossibility.

Just imagine how much more of this there is out there.

CBS News reports:

Hospice with 97% survival rate accused of defrauding Medicare for $7.45M

The FBI arrested a married couple Thursday accused of fraudulently billing Medicare for $7.45 million while running a hospice with a survival rate reported to be more than 97% after five years. They were the first in a series of arrests planned Thursday, federal officials told CBS News.

A high survival rate at a hospice provider is one of a series of red flags identified by state auditors for fraud because most people enter hospice care in the final stages of a terminal illness. In past cases of fraud, operators were found to be using false or stolen identities to collect federal reimbursements for palliative care.

The targets of the early morning operation were Gladwin and Amelou Gill, a doctor and psychologist who co-own 626 Hospice, which does business as St. Francis Palliative Care, according to the FBI.

The FBI raid took place in the residential neighborhood of San Dimas, California, as FBI SWAT personnel announced over a loud speaker they have an arrest warrant. CBS News was at the Southern California location when the FBI agents executed the first early morning arrests. Also on the scene was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Trump-appointed official who oversees the federal Medicare system.

The Justice Department later announced that eight people, including the Gills, had been arrested and federally charged in connection with a health care and hospice fraud investigation.

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Woke San Francisco nonprofit boss charged with fraud made local library buy 1,500 copies of HER children’s book, netting her $100,000

A former California civil rights leader is accused of pocketing $100,000 by directing a library to buy thousands of her children’s books, amid allegations she siphoned funds meant for the black community. 

Sheryl Davis, former director of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, was arrested Monday on allegations of a ‘pervasive pattern of self-dealing,’ with prosecutors accusing her of misappropriating thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds. 

She allegedly used her partner’s nonprofit as a ‘slush fund’ for lavish personal spending, including travel, VIP party tickets and even her son’s tuition at UCLA. 

On Tuesday, an affidavit revealed that thousands of dollars were personally used toward promoting her children’s book through questionable deals and high-profile, celebrity-studded events, according to The New York Post.

The once-respected activist allegedly arranged the sale of 1,500 copies of ‘Free to Sing’ to the San Francisco Public Library, her book about a young black girl’s passion for singing despite criticism.

Davis raked in $100,000 in 2024 from book sales through her publisher, Book Baby, under the deal, according to an economic disclosure filing.

From 2021 to 2024, the nonprofit spent upwards of $30,000 on hotels and singer Goapele’s performances at two events, including $5,000 for a 2023 book launch party for Davis. 

The city’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) also spent at least $6,000 on the firm Varner PR, along with other expenses, to further promote sales. 

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