A Granada Hills man has been sentenced to a dozen years behind bars for his role in a years-long scheme to defraud Medicare of more than $17 million through sham hospice companies and his home health care company, officials announced Tuesday.
Petros Fichidzhyan, 44, pleaded guilty in February to federal charges of health care fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
At sentencing Monday in Los Angeles federal court, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson ordered Fichidzhyan to pay $17.1 million in restitution, and the court preliminarily ordered the forfeiture of a home bought with fraudulent proceeds, court papers show.
According to court documents, Fichidzhyan schemed with others to bill Medicare for hospice services that were not medically necessary and never provided. He and his co-schemers controlled hospice entities and used foreign nationals’ personal information to conceal the scheme, using the personal information to, among other things, open bank accounts, submit information to Medicare and sign property leases, the DOJ said.
Fichidzhyan and associates also misappropriated the names and information of several doctors, two of whom were deceased, to fraudulently bill Medicare for purported hospice services. Medicare paid the sham hospices nearly $16 million, of which Fichidzhyan received nearly $7 million, with more than $5.3 million laundered through a dozen shell and third-party bank accounts, according to the DOJ.
Fichidzhyan also obtained more than $1 million in false claims paid to his home health care agency, which fraudulently used a doctor’s name and identifying information as having certified Medicare beneficiaries for home health care. When the doctor confronted Fichidzhyan about the fraud, Fichidzhyan attempted to cover up the scheme by paying the doctor $11,000, court papers show.