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View Winners → Crime Apr 06, 2023
Paul Mansour, second from left, with co-workers at Best Buy Drugs in Sierra Madre in 2016. | Photo by Terry Miller/HeySoCal.com
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A Sierra Madre-based pharmacist pleaded guilty Wednesday to submitting fraudulent claims to Medicare for prescription drugs that were never dispensed to patients.
Paul Mansour, 55, was a pharmacist and co-owner at Mansour Partners Inc., doing business as Best Buy Drugs, according to court documents. Mansour made phony patient profiles in the company’s digital filing system and created fraudulent prescription drug entries to these fictitious patient files, which duplicated prescriptions for medications that were provided to actual patients of the pharmacy.
“Mansour then submitted false and fraudulent claims for the drugs added in the fictitious patient files that had never been dispensed, billing Medicare for the fraudulent prescriptions in the names of real patients of the pharmacy,” according to prosecutors. “Between January 2017 and June 2022, Mansour caused Medicare to pay the pharmacy between approximately $600,000 and over $1 million as a result of the submission of false and fraudulent claims.”
Mansour pleaded guilty to one count of health care fraud and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 28, prosecutors said. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
The FBI Los Angeles Field Office and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General investigated the case before turning it over to federal prosecutors.
“The Fraud Section leads the Criminal Division’s efforts to combat health care fraud through the Health Care Fraud Strike Force Program,” according to the Justice Department. “Since March 2007, this program, comprised of 15 strike forces operating in 25 federal districts, has charged more than 5,000 defendants who collectively have billed federal health care programs and private insurers more than $24 billion. In addition, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, are taking steps to hold providers accountable for their involvement in health care fraud schemes.”
More information can be found at www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/health-care-fraud-unit.
