An indictment was unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn charging Peter Khaim and Arkadiy Khaimov, the owners of over a dozen pharmacies in New York City and on Long Island, for their roles in a $30 million healthcare fraud and money laundering scheme in which they exploited emergency codes and edits in the Medicare system that went into effect due to the COVID-19 pandemic in order to submit fraudulent claims for expensive cancer drugs that were never provided, ordered or authorized by medical professionals. According to the indictment, the defendants used COVID-19 emergency override billing codes in order to submit fraudulent claims to Medicare, for which they were paid over $30 million for cancer medication Targretin Gel 1% including for claims where the medication never was purchased by the pharmacies, prescribed by physicians or dispensed to patients — often during periods when pharmacies were non-operational — and using doctors’ names on prescriptions without their permission. The defendants allegedly acquired control over more than a dozen New York pharmacies by paying others to pose as the owners of the pharmacies and hiring pharmacists to pretend to be supervising pharmacists at the pharmacies for the purpose of obtaining pharmacy licenses. Targretin Gel 1% has an average wholesale price of approximately $34,000 for each 60 gram tube.
