Two men sentenced in $522 million DNA testing fraud that bilked Medicare and Medicaid

A federal judge on Monday sentenced two Georgia men for their roles in a sprawling $522 million health care fraud scheme that used fake medical orders, illegal kickbacks, and unnecessary genetic tests to siphon tens of millions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. One of the defendants tried to flee the country before authorities caught him at the border.

Reyad Salahaldeen, 57, of Buford, Georgia, received 12 years and seven months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. His co-defendant, Mohamad Mustafa, 28, of Duluth, Georgia, was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to paying illegal health care kickbacks, Fox News reported.

The Justice Department did not mince words about what happened here.

“Under the guise of health care, these two fraudsters attempted to steal more than half a billion dollars from taxpayers.”

That half-billion-dollar figure represents the total fraudulent claims the labs submitted. Federal prosecutors said Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers actually paid out roughly $84 million before the scheme collapsed. Salahaldeen was ordered to repay more than $84.5 million. Mustafa must pay more than $64.3 million.

How the scheme worked

Court documents show Salahaldeen controlled multiple laboratories across New Jersey, Georgia, and Texas, including outfits called Express Diagnostics and BioConfirm Laboratories. The operation ran from 2018 through August 2020, a two-year stretch during which the defendants built an elaborate pipeline for generating bogus claims.

Marketers fanned out through telemarketing calls, door-to-door outreach, and health fairs to collect DNA samples and insurance information from patients across the country. The tests were often not medically necessary, federal prosecutors said. The genetic testing orders came from medical providers who had not treated the patients and did not use the results in their care.

In other words, the entire medical justification was a fiction. Salahaldeen falsified requisition forms, letters of medical necessity, and other records to make the claims look legitimate, authorities said. Mustafa co-controlled some of the laboratories, paid kickbacks to the marketers, and created sham contracts and invoices to disguise illegal payments as legitimate marketing services.

The scale is worth pausing on. These were not one-off billing errors. This was a nationwide operation with labs in three states, marketers working health fairs and phone banks, and a paper trail engineered to fool federal payment systems. It is the kind of benefit fraud that drains billions from taxpayers year after year.

A border run that failed

Salahaldeen’s sentencing carries an extra chapter. After learning of the charges against him, he did not turn himself in. Instead, authorities said he traveled from North Carolina to Texas and attempted to cross into Mexico using another person’s identification.

He was apprehended at the border.

Officials described Salahaldeen as a Palestinian national who became a lawful permanent resident in 2004. His attempt to flee using someone else’s ID adds identity fraud to a case already defined by layers of deception. The court ordered him to forfeit more than $3 million from bank accounts, a 2019 GMC Yukon, and properties in Texas and Georgia.

Eleven co-conspirators already sentenced

Salahaldeen and Mustafa were not the first to face consequences. Eleven additional co-conspirators have already been sentenced in the case, receiving penalties ranging from probation to nearly four years in prison. The breadth of the conspiracy, at least thirteen defendants, shows how many hands were involved in keeping the fraud machine running.

Attorney information for Salahaldeen and Mustafa was not immediately available. The court and jurisdiction where the sentencings took place were not specified in available reporting.

The case fits a pattern of massive fraud targeting taxpayer-funded health programs. In Minnesota, a separate pandemic-era scheme allegedly siphoned more than $240 million in federal funds meant to feed children, leading to dozens of charges and sentences of up to 28 years in prison. That case has produced its own cascade of guilty pleas, including from members of the same family.

The federal fraud enforcement push

Justice Department officials said the DNA testing case reflects an intensified push to combat fraud under Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which is chaired by Vice President JD Vance. The department pointed to its Health Care Fraud Strike Force Program, which since 2007 has charged more than 6,200 defendants responsible for over $45 billion in fraudulent billing.

Those numbers tell two stories at once. On one hand, federal prosecutors are clearly willing to bring big cases. On the other, the sheer volume, $45 billion in fraudulent billing across nearly two decades, reveals a system that has been hemorrhaging money for years. Every dollar stolen from Medicare and Medicaid is a dollar that came out of the paychecks of working Americans or added to the national debt.

The administration’s emphasis on fraud enforcement is a welcome development. But the DNA testing case also raises hard questions about why it took from 2018 to now for full accountability. The scheme ran for more than two years before it stopped. The labs billed $522 million. The payouts reached $84 million. That is a lot of money moving through federal systems before anyone pulled the plug.

Recent months have brought other large-scale fraud busts as well. Federal authorities arrested eight people in an alleged $50 million hospice fraud scheme targeting Medicare, and a federal judge has upheld the Trump administration’s Medicaid funding hold on Minnesota as part of the broader anti-fraud fight. Each case adds to the picture of a health care payment system riddled with vulnerabilities.

What taxpayers deserve

The restitution orders, $84.5 million for Salahaldeen, $64.3 million for Mustafa, sound large. Whether taxpayers will ever see that money is another question entirely. Restitution in fraud cases is notoriously difficult to collect, especially when assets have been spent, hidden, or moved across borders.

What is clear is that the incentive structure in federal health care programs continues to attract sophisticated criminal enterprises. Fake labs, fake orders, fake medical necessity letters, the entire apparatus existed because the payment systems were willing to write checks first and ask questions later. Until those systems are hardened against fraud on the front end, prosecutors will keep mopping up on the back end.

Twelve years in federal prison is a serious sentence. But for a scheme that tried to steal half a billion dollars from the American public, and nearly got away with $84 million of it, taxpayers are entitled to ask whether the deterrent matches the damage.