COVID Testing Company CareCube Was Vast Fraud, Feds Say
The founder was charged with criminal conspiracy, fraud, and bribery.
Remember CareCube? During the pandemic, the COVID-testing company had multiplied across 20 different locations, taking advantage of the broad need for people to get swabbed. It just as quickly got a reputation for ripping people off, sometimes double-billing insurance companies and patients for the same procedure.
In January 2022, I investigated the accusations and found that not only were they being accused of systematically overcharging customers, but they were also accused of using the medical offices as part of a referral network that would lead elderly patients to getting medically unnecessary surgeries. These painful procedures were largely being done at the medical headquarters of Dr. Niranjan K. Mittal, a cardiologist in Bay Ridge, who would charge insurers as much as $10,000 per procedure, according to the people I spoke with. “A lot of patients always complained, ‘I don’t want to do the procedure; the last time I had the procedure, my leg was still hurting. I don’t want to go back there anymore,’” a former employee said at the time. The day after that story published, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into its billing practices, and would settle with the company in July — including full refunds for New Yorkers, with paid interest.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed their own charges against Mittal largely related to the unnecessary surgeries, including two counts of conspiracy to violate fraud and anti-kickback laws, as well as fraud and bribery charges. (The investigation was conducted with Homeland Security Investigations and the IRS.) According to the court documents, Mittal is accused of billing more than $100 million worth of peripheral angiograms — a procedure where a doctor usually inserts a catheter into a patient’s groin to check for arterial blockages — and paying some doctors more than $100,000 in bribes, disguised as “rent” payments, for patients. When those patients would come to his Bay Ridge office, he or other doctors would allegedly note fake symptoms on their notes. Those notes would then get sent to other employees, who “generated a typewritten note from templates, in which they randomly picked additional symptoms to support whatever tests had been ordered,” according to Mittal’s indictment. Authorities said some patients had received as many as 15 of the procedures.
Mittal was arrested on Thursday and released on a $5 million personal recognizance bond. He did not enter a plea during his arraignment. “He is deeply upset by the unfair accusations being made of him in the prosecutor’s indictment and intends to show the Court and his community that he always provided necessary, and sometimes life-saving treatment, to his patients,” his lawyer, Henry E. Mazurek, said in a statement. “This indictment is proof of nothing.”