TOLEDO – Ankita Singh, 42, previously from Maumee, Ohio, was sentenced to 26 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary for her involvement in a durable medical equipment (DME) scheme that defrauded the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicare Program. Additionally, she must pay $4,470,931.02 in restitution, serve two years of supervised release, and pay a $600 special assessment fee.
On February 29, 2024, a jury convicted Singh of six counts of health care fraud for signing false orders for orthotic braces that patients neither requested nor needed, as part of the DME scheme.
Starting in 2019, Singh worked as an independent contractor for at least two companies, supposedly to provide “telehealth services,” and was paid to conduct patient consultations. However, these consultations never occurred. Telemarketers cold-called Medicare beneficiaries, promising them orthotic braces at no cost. These beneficiaries were not Singh’s patients, and she never spoke to them. Singh never saw them in person nor conducted a telehealth visit. The telemarketers prepared orders with the beneficiaries’ names, Medicare numbers, and false diagnoses to justify the braces as medically necessary. These orders were then sent electronically to Singh for her to sign, certifying that she was treating the beneficiaries and that the braces were medically necessary. Singh signed over 11,000 prescriptions for orthotic braces for around 3,000 Medicare beneficiaries with whom she had no patient-physician relationship, often ordering multiple braces per patient without ever examining them.
Due to Singh’s false orders, over $8 million was billed to Medicare for unnecessary orthotic devices. Medicare paid approximately $4.47 million in claims for the fraudulent prescriptions signed by Singh.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gene Crawford and Angelita Cruz Bridges for the Northern District of Ohio. It was investigated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – Office of Inspector General, and the FBI.
