DOJ Healthcare Fraud Unit Wins Six Jury Convictions in Under Three Weeks, $1.1B in Fraud

The Justice Department's Health Care Fraud Unit secured six federal jury convictions in under three weeks, spanning five districts and over $1.1 billion in fraud losses.

Six Convictions, Five Districts, $1.1 Billion in Three Weeks

The Justice Department's National Fraud Enforcement Division's Health Care Fraud Unit secured federal jury convictions in six separate trials between May 13 and June 1, DOJ Justice News reports — a span of just under three weeks that tied the unit's own record for convictions within a single month period.

The verdicts came from courtrooms in Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, and Nashville, covering six distinct categories of health care fraud and more than $1.1 billion in total fraud losses.

Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, who leads the National Fraud Enforcement Division, said the results reflect both the unit's capacity to proactively detect schemes and the depth of its trial lawyers. "The American people should rest assured that we are prepared to seek accountability at trial for health care fraudsters, whether for a $1 million fraud in Michigan or a $1 billion fraud in South Florida," McDonald said. "The Fraud Division is providing full-spectrum accountability to any fraudster who seeks to use Americans' hard-earned savings as their personal piggy-bank."

The Health Care Fraud Unit has now completed nine trials in 2026, all resulting in convictions, and 17 trials in 2025. The unit operates through integrated teams pairing specialized prosecutors with data analysts, investigators, and paralegals from the start of an investigation through the return of a verdict.

Brett Blackman and the $1 Billion Telehealth Platform

The largest case involved Brett Blackman, founder and CEO of HealthSplash, which operated DMERx — an internet platform that prosecutors described not as a legitimate medical service but as an industrialized fraud operation.

Foreign call centers sent mass mailers to hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, pressuring elderly patients into accepting medically unnecessary orthotic braces. DMERx then connected those leads to telemedicine companies that took illegal kickbacks in exchange for signing physicians' orders falsely certifying that a doctor had personally examined each patient — in many cases, no such contact ever occurred.

A government undercover agent posing as a Medicare beneficiary documented the scheme directly: a foreign call center pushed the agent into accepting multiple braces, after which a DMERx-affiliated doctor signed orders claiming to have conducted in-person tests that are physically impossible to perform remotely.

To avoid Medicare audits, Blackman and co-conspirators manipulated physicians' orders and used sham contracts to disguise kickback payments. The scheme generated more than $1 billion in false billings; Medicare paid out more than $450 million. Blackman was convicted of health care fraud conspiracy, kickback conspiracy, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. His co-defendant Gary Cox, convicted in a prior trial, has already been sentenced to 15 years in prison. The case was prosecuted in the Southern District of Florida.

Data Anomaly Leads to $45 Million Botox Fraud Conviction

A second high-profile conviction began not with a witness or tip, but with a statistical outlier flagged by the unit's Data Analytics Team.

Dr. Violetta Mailyan had been paid more by Medicare for Botox injections than any other physician in the United States — more than $24 million over four years, roughly six times the billing of the next-highest provider group, all of whom were neurologists. The data anomaly triggered the investigation; trial evidence confirmed what the numbers suggested.

Mailyan billed for thousands of Botox injections that were never administered — including on days when she was traveling to Cabo San Lucas, Maui, Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, and New York. She submitted a claim for a patient who was federally incarcerated at the time of the purported injection. More than $19 million in claims were submitted on days her clinic was closed. She also back-dated claims to bill for injections allegedly provided before patients had even contacted her clinic to schedule an appointment.

When federal investigators issued a grand jury subpoena, Mailyan fabricated and back-dated patient consent forms and medical records, then delivered the altered documents to agents — adding obstruction charges to the existing fraud counts. Following the verdict, the jury found that a Tesla Model X, a Tesla Cybertruck, and brokerage accounts valued at over $7.3 million were subject to forfeiture.

Integrated Teams and Data-Driven Prosecution

The six convictions reflect a model the Health Care Fraud Unit has refined over multiple years: specialized Assistant Chiefs for Trials oversee and support litigating teams across the country, maintaining institutional knowledge and trial readiness at each stage of an investigation.

The cases behind the recent verdicts ranged in complexity from data-driven Botox billing analysis to the simultaneous management of health care data analytics, financial forensics, digital evidence, and expert testimony in the Blackman telehealth prosecution — each requiring a distinct set of investigative and courtroom skills, all carried by the same integrated team structure.

Source: DOJ Justice News