Authorities have arrested 16 people, including three city employees, for running a Medicaid “cards for sale” scam that cost taxpayers more than $2 million, the state attorney general’s office said yesterday.
The scammers even sold the cards – designed to aid the city’s poor – to one married couple who operated a “profitable psychic business” and had a $98,000 BMW, according to authorities.
The fraud ring, which included five recruiters, who advertised in Russian-language newspapers promising Medicaid coverage, and three crooked city employees, sold Medicaid cards to people not eligible for the benefits, authorities said.
The scheme, which had been in operation since 1998, involved three employees of the city’s Human Resources Administration – Gail Gutman, 47, Claudette Garries, 54, and Inna Markovich, 51 – who created Medicaid cards for people who did not meet the eligibility requirements, for bribes of $100 or less, investigators said.
Gutman and Garries are charged with conspiracy, grand larceny, bribe receiving and tampering with public records.