In California, an epic fraud scheme under the control of Dr. Munir Uwaydah has made its way into court. There are 11 defendants and four more co-defendants who each had a role in the medical and insurance scam that a former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley called “non-traditional organized crime”.

The defendants billed several hundred million dollars in fraudulent insurance claims, many of which were workers’ compensation claims. The services they billed for never occurred; some were even for fake surgeries.

Cooley said this kind of fraud still exists because there is so much money in the health care industry that people take advantage of it to get a piece of the money.

Prosecutors in the case said that the group had so much money they were trying to launder it, they put their names on several shell companies and had multiple bank accounts to try and hide the money and who it was coming from.

They were charged with more than just insurance fraud, they were also charged with aggravated mayhem. Prosecutors in the case say that the defendants had patients cut or scarred by a physician’s assistant to increase their billing capabilities. They performed medically unnecessary surgeries on patients, and even though there are only 21 who will be presented in the trial as the group’s victims prosecutors think there are many more victims. The group wrote prescriptions for unnecessary and expensive medicines, and even doctored the results of medical tests to try and justify operations that should not have been reasonable otherwise. It is thought that Uwaydah let his physician’s assistant perform unsupervised procedures even though he was not licensed or trained to do so. Workers’ compensation lawyers were said to have received kickbacks to direct patients to Uwaydah and his associates.

Uwaydah fled to Lebanon as investigators came knocking about the fraud and a possible link to the murder of Juliana Redding. Investigators still are not sure of his whereabouts. One of Uwaydah’s employees, Kim Park, was acquitted of Redding’s murder but is back in court as one of the defendants in this fraud scheme. Hopefully the court can bring all the people involved in this scheme to justice.