Rajesh “Raj” Patel, a 52-year-old resident of Schaumburg, Illinois, now faces five counts of wire fraud after the US Department of Justice alleged he orchestrated a $66.2 million scheme to bill the government for PCR tests that never happened. The indictment details a brazen operation spanning May 2021 to April 2022, where Patel’s laboratory in Hillside, Illinois, generated fake negative results for at least 380,000 patients.
The mechanism was deceptively simple yet financially massive. Patel’s lab struck a deal with Meridian Medical Staffing Inc. in March 2021, paying the company tens of millions of dollars to collect samples and provide biological data for purported patients. But prosecutors claim many of these individuals did not exist or never provided samples. Despite this, Patel’s lab stamped those phantom tests as “negative” and submitted the claims to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Uninsured Program.
The federal government, relying on these fabricated documents, cut checks totaling approximately $44.1 million. Patel personally pocketed around $28 million from the scheme. Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s Fraud Division stated that Patel exploited the public health emergency for personal gain by fabricating test results.
If convicted on all five counts, Patel faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years each, running consecutively. This case is part of the Justice Department’s Health Care Fraud Strike Force, which has charged over 6,200 defendants since 2007 in cases involving more than $45 billion in alleged fraudulent billing to federal healthcare programs.