Indian National Pleads Guilty In $227 Million COVID Test Scam, Bought Data From Pakistani Firm

Syed Murtuza Kablazada, an Indian national living in Des Plaines, Illinois, pleaded guilty Friday to a Medicare fraud scheme that billed $227 million for over-the-counter COVID-19 test kits nobody ordered, the Justice Department said. Prosecutors say he paid about $11 million to a purported telemarketing company in Pakistan for the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, then used it to file the claims.

Kablazada, 36, and his co-schemers bought three Chicago-area laboratories – Chicago Care, V Care and Al-Ameer – in a six-month stretch starting in January 2023, according to court documents and his plea. The labs submitted $227 million in claims for test kits that beneficiaries never requested and never received. Medicare paid about $136 million of it.

To hide their role, prosecutors say, the group paid themselves through overseas money transfers and unlicensed money transmitters and spent part of the proceeds on luxury vehicles. As part of the plea agreement, Kablazada agreed to forfeit more than $46 million in fraud proceeds that law enforcement seized from ten bank accounts.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of health care fraud and faces a maximum of 20 years in prison. A federal judge will set the sentence at a later date after weighing the sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors.

The case began in May 2025, when the Justice Department announced an indictment against Kablazada, then 34 and listed as living in Arlington Heights, and Syed Mehdi Hussain, 32, of Carol Stream. They were charged with four counts each. That indictment said the labs rarely sent kits to anyone and billed for beneficiaries who hadn’t asked for them, including dead people, and that the defendants placed foreign nationals at the labs as nominee owners who were expected to leave the country if investigators closed in. The earlier release puts the billing between September 2022 and June 2023 and does not mention Pakistan; the plea release, which does, dates the scheme from January 2023. Hussain’s case is not covered in the plea announcement.

Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, FBI Chicago and HHS’s Office of Inspector General made the announcement. The FBI and HHS-OIG investigated, and prosecutors from the Fraud Division’s Health Care Fraud Section are handling the case with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Illinois.

The department announced the Fraud Division on April 7 and ties its work to the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud chaired by Vice President J.D. Vance. As we reported, HHS is also deferring another $1.2 billion in Medicaid funding to California over fraud concerns.