Five individuals were arrested on criminal charges related to their roles in a years-long scheme to defraud Medicare of more than $15 million through sham hospice companies and then to launder the fraud proceeds. According to an indictment, three of the defendants misappropriated the identifying information of doctors, claiming to Medicare that the doctors had determined hospice services were necessary when, in fact, the purported recipients of these hospice services were not terminally ill and had never requested nor received care from the sham hospices. In some instances, the defendants falsely claimed that the same beneficiary received services from multiple sham hospices. All of the defendants are charged with conspiracy to launder money and money laundering. Read a Department of Justice press release.