COVID fraud probe finds suburban Chicago lab listed dead people as clients, bilked Medicare out of millions

A Lombard man has been charged with bilking the federal government out of more than $12.4 million in fraudulent Medicare claims for advanced COVID-19 tests that prosecutors say his company never performed — including thousands of tests that were billed for people who investigators learned were dead.

Abdul Wahed’s company, Pro Diagnostics in Bridgeview, is suspected of using a suburban doctor’s credentials without her knowledge to approve the tests, according to court papers filed in the federal investigation. Tens of thousands of Medicare claims for tests in Illinois and other states showed the same doctor ordered them, which aroused suspicions, according to the court filing.

Pro Diagnostics billed Medicare for 48,552 claims on Dec. 6 and for another 35,585 claims the next day, according to the affidavit, which says law enforcement officials were alerted because of the “extraordinary spike in billing."

The company told Medicare officials that the tests were performed between May 2023 and July 2023. But investigators say they turned up a giant discrepancy involving 4,100 of the people on whom the tests supposedly were done: That wasn't possible because they were dead.

The company billed Medicare for hundreds of tests for people who'd been dead for more than two years, authorities say.

Investigators interviewed people in Aurora and outside Illinois who told hem they never got tested by Pro Diagnostics despite the bills the company submitted to Medicare in their names.

Pro Diagnostics billed the government for COVID genotype tests and for respiratory pathogen panel testing, which Medicare calls “add-on” tests. Last year, the inspector general's office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing it found that about 400 of 19,000 labs across the country billed the government for add-on tests at “questionably high levels,” raising concerns about fraud.

The FBI and the HHS inspector general conducted a joint investigation of Wahed. In a recently unsealed criminal complaint, he's accused of health care fraud.

Wahed, 26, is a native of India and entered the United States on a student visa, according to the affidavit in his case. A warrant has been issued for his arrest.

In an unrelated case, federal prosecutors charged Syed Shaukat Ahmed of Morton Grove last month with bilking the government out of more than $30 million to provide people with free COVID-19 test kits that were never delivered. He’s also accused of charging Medicare for dead people to whom he said he delivered the kits.

Authorities say fraudsters have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars from federal COVID-19 relief programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program, which was set up to help businesses that faced financial struggles in 2020 and 2021 as business fell off because of the pandemic.

Watchdogs for government agencies in the Chicago area have said they suspect that thousands of their employees engaged in PPP fraud. Only a small percentage of those employees, including Chicago police officers, have been charged in the last few years, as investigations into suspected PPP fraud continue.