Gregory Schreck, a vice president of the company that operated DMERx, pleaded guilty to operating an internet-based platform that generated false doctors’ orders to defraud Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs of more than $1 billion. According to court documents, Schreck admitted that he and his co-conspirators targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries to provide their personally identifiable information and agree to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces, pain creams, and other items through misleading mailers, television advertisements, and calls from offshore call centers. Fraudulent doctors’ orders generated by DMERx falsely represented that a doctor examined and treated Medicare beneficiaries when, in reality, purported telemedicine companies paid doctors to sign the orders without regard to medical necessity and were based only on a brief telephone call with the beneficiary, or sometimes no interaction with the beneficiary at all. Read a story from the Johnson County Post and a Department of Justice press release.