Chiropractor Gets 5 Years for Fraudulent Billing Scheme

Friday, September 28, 2018 | 0

A federal judge in Kentucky has sentenced a chiropractor to five years in prison for fraudulently billing insurance carriers more than $5 million.

Claudia Lopez, 40, from Fountain, Colorado, also must pay more than $232,600 in restitution, and must forfeit her Audi Q7 luxury car and more than $53,700 in cash, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Louisville.

From 2012 to 2014, Lopez and five other defendants recruited chiropractors to Louisville-area clinics so that their national provider numbers could be used to bill insurers for services that never happened, prosecutors said. The group also recruited employees from a nearby shipbuilding company to be patients at the clinics.

The clinics billed carriers for expensive muscle-relaxant injections that totaled more than $5 million.