Morton Grove man claimed to ship COVID-19 test kits to Medicare participants, but FBI says they were dead

A Morton Grove man whose companies billed the federal government more than $30 million to provide free COVID-19 test kits to Medicare recipients has been charged with defrauding the government insurance program that covers people over 65.

Syed Shaukat Ahmed’s Western Labs Co. and Zoom Lab Inc. claimed to have shipped thousands of testing kits to Medicare beneficiaries — but the people it said it shipped the kits to were dead, according to the FBI.

He’s also accused of billing Medicare for kits that people later told the FBI they didn’t order or receive. Under the program’s rules, the recipients had to request the kits.

Ahmed, 59, spent $500,000 of his Medicare proceeds to pay off the mortgage on his home, the FBI said.

Ahmed started Western Labs in 2021 and assumed control of Zoom Lab in April 2023. In the months after he took over Zoom Lab in 2023, the two companies submitted claims to Medicare for more than 3.1 million COVID-19 test kits, according to the FBI.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Chicago, Ahmed is accused of taking advantage of a one-year grace period that allowed companies to continue to bill Medicare if they hadn’t been reimbursed for test kits that they'd shipped before the COVID-19 program ended in May 2023.

Last year, the FBI visited the Chicago addresses for Ahmed’s two companies — one near Peterson and California avenues on the North Side, the other near Western Avenue and Fulton Street on the Near West Side — but found no sign of any business activity, according to an affidavit filed in the case.

On Thursday, Ahmed was released from jail in lieu of $5 bail. His lawyer declined to comment.