An indictment was unsealed charging Oleg Beretsky with conspiring to commit healthcare fraud, violating the federal Anti-Kickback Statute, conspiring to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute, and money laundering conspiracy. Beretsky was arrested on March 18 in Naples, Florida. As alleged in court filings, from January 2017 to April 2024, Beretsky and co-conspirators engaged in a healthcare fraud, kickback and money laundering scheme. Beretsky was the owner of Obest, Inc., a company in Plainview, New York, that purported to provide healthcare professionals with billing, consulting and support services.
In reality, Obest’s principal business consisted of referring elderly Medicare patients to doctors and other healthcare professionals in exchange for kickbacks and bribes. Many of these patients were immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who Beretsky identified through an employee of a nonprofit social service agency that provided housing and other services to senior citizens in Brooklyn and Queens. Beretsky cultivated relationships with many of these patients, which he used to gain control over decisions regarding their healthcare providers. Beretsky then used that control to ensure that only doctors and other providers—including social workers, pain specialists and diagnostic companies—who were willing to pay him would have access to the patients. On at least one occasion, Beretsky threatened a patient who wanted to continue seeing a provider who had stopped paying illegal kickbacks to the defendant.
