(The Center Square) — In the past year, Maryland’s U.S. Attorney’s Office has prosecuted cases against 20 defendants who committed COVID fraud with losses totaling an alleged $40 million.
The office established its COVID-19 Fraud Strike Force in August 2022 and has since seen its criminal prosecutions of pandemic fraud-related cases “significantly increase,” Public Affairs Specialist Marcia Lubin told The Center Square.
The strike force is one of just three COVID fraud strike forces in the country — created to supplement the work of the Department of Justice’s COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task, founded in 2021.
As of September 2022, when the state strike forces were created, the DOJ’s task force had seized over $1.2 billion in fraudulently obtained or used COVID-19 relief funds and had conducted investigations in civil cases connected to more than $6 billion in pandemic relief loans.
Maryland just concluded a case Friday whose losses account for almost half the alleged total losses it has prosecuted so far. A doctor billed more than $15 million in claims to Medicare and “a commercial insurer” on behalf of patients who came to his clinic for COVID tests, according to a DOJ release.
The doctor, Rob Elfenbein, owned Drs ERgent Care LLC, dba First Call Medical Center and Chesapeake ERgent Care. Drs ERgent Care offered drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites at multiple locations in Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties. He told his employees to bill the insurance providers for the patients’ tests and “high-level evaluation and management visits.”
A federal jury convicted Elfenbein of five counts of health care fraud with a maximum penalty of 10 years for each count. Elfenbein is the first doctor to have been convicted at trial by the DOJ for this specific type of crime – “billing for office visits in connection with patients seeking COVID-19 tests,” according to the release.
Maryland’s U.S. Attorney’s Office is conducting numerous other criminal investigations, alongside 19 active civil fraud cases pending with approximately $30 million in potential loss, according to Lubin.
