Federal officials have charged seven people across Southern California accused of defrauding government-funded healthcare programs like Medi-Cal and Medicare of millions of dollars and accused several doctors of using their positions to wrongfully prescribe each other controlled substances, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday, June 23.
The charges are part of a Trump administration effort targeting “fraud, waste and abuse within Federal programs,” the DOJ said in a news release.
Federal law enforcement officials have brought charges against 455 people across the country accused of defrauding healthcare programs and participating in opioid abuse schemes, which they allege have resulted in more than $6.5 million in false claims and patient harm, in some cases causing death.
Those charged in Southern California include Christina Mareik of Whittier, who prosecutors allege participated in a scheme involving nearly $270 million in false claims to Medi-Cal in less than a year. The Medi-Cal claims were made for expensive prescription drugs that contained generic ingredients, weren’t medically necessary and, oftentimes, weren’t given to the listed patients, according to the DOJ said. Mareik was arrested on June 17 and was released on a $100,000 bond.
Mareik, 61, worked for Paul Richard Randall, a patient marketer for Montclair-based Monte VP LLC. Randall worked with Monte Vista Pharmacy owner Kyrollos Mekail to take advantage of a suspension of Medi-Cal’s requirement for healthcare providers to get prior authorization of certain services and medications in order to get reimbursement as the program switched to a new payment system, federal officials said.
From May 2022 to August 2023, prosecutors allege, Mareik had Patricia Anderson of West Hills sign off on bogus prescriptions for patients Anderson had not seen or that weren’t medically necessary, amounting to $270 million billed to Medi-Cal and $178 million of which Medi-Cal paid out.
When patients complained that they had received medications for which they had no use or hadn’t known they’d be prescribed, Mareik spoke to them to prevent them from talking with law enforcement, according to the DOJ.
For her part in the alleged scheme, Mareik received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent Medi-Cal funds.
If convicted, she could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Her alleged co-conspirator Randall faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in federal prison after pleading guilty in April to one count of wire fraud committed while on release.
In a separate case, Oren David Shachar of Van Nuys, Abraham Shin of Corona and Jeannie Choi of Torrance are accused of participating in a healthcare fraud scheme involving submitting false claims for medically unnecessary hospice care services. Prosecutors allege Schachar made false claims for unnecessary hospice services between February 2021 and March 2026 because the patients weren’t terminally ill or they already had died. He later brought Shin and Choi into the scheme in 2025, paying them for the personal information of living and deceased patients, officials said.
The DOJ accused the defendants of trying to defraud Medicare out of about $27 million.
In another case, Brenda Lee Lopez of Norwalk, a medical office manager, was accused of making false orders for urinary tract infection tests, respiratory pathogen panels and oral toxicology screens for Medicare beneficiaries using forged signatures of several medical providers, prosecutors said.
Beneficiaries never provided samples for the tests, and in some cases some of the patients were dead at the time the tests were ordered, according to the DOJ. Lopez gave the orders to a laboratory, which billed Medicare approximately $9.08 million, of which about $2.1 million was paid. The laboratory also paid Lopez and her family about $335,000 for referrals for the fraudulent tests, which prosecutors said Lopez used to pay co-conspirators or spent at a casino.
When one provider learned his name was used without his knowledge to order hundreds of tests to the laboratory, Lopez tried to pay him off, prosecutors allege.
Lynn Galbraith, owner of Azure Hospice Care Inc. in Garden Grove, was also accused of submitting more than $2.26 million in fraudulent claims for hospice services to Medicare between April 2021 and February 2024, the majority of which Medicare paid out.
In another case, three physicians, Wisam Khader of Irvine, Patrick Murphy of Irvine and Justin Evans of Lakewood, Colorado, were accused of illegally writing almost 90 prescriptions for one another for oxycodone, amphetamine, morphine and other controlled substances outside their medical practice and without a medical purpose, according to the DOJ.
Finally, prosecutors accused psychiatrist Eugene Richard Dorsey of Western Orthopaedic Surgical Associates in Laguna Hills of falsifying psychiatric reports so that claimants would qualify for federal workers’ compensation and making false claims for reimbursement of medical services, netting more than $1.8 million in overpayments.