An ex-pharmacist from Sierra Madre was sentenced Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles to two years behind bars for submitting false claims to Medicare for prescription drugs that were never dispensed to patients.
Paul Mansour, 56, was also ordered to pay fines and restitution of about $1.138 million, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Mansour pleaded guilty last year to one federal count of health care fraud.
Mansour, who was a pharmacist at Best Buy Drugs in Sierra Madre, which he co-owned, created fake patient profiles and added fraudulent entries that duplicated prescriptions for medications provided to genuine patients of the store, according to the DOJ.
He then submitted bogus claims for drugs added in the fictitious patient files that had never been dispensed, billing Medicare for the fake prescriptions in the names of actual patients.
Between January 2017 and June 2022, Mansour caused Medicare to pay the pharmacy between $600,000 and over $1 million as a result of the submission of the phony claims, the DOJ said.