A Maryland man who ran a fraud scheme in which he impersonated doctors to create bogus e-prescribing accounts that generated phony prescriptions for narcotics that were dispensed at pharmacies in Los Angeles and elsewhere and resold on the street for \u201csignificant\u201d profits was sentenced Tuesday to five years and five months in federal prison.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Washington, 25, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles federal court in September to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.<\/p>\n
The defendant admitted that after obtaining doctors\u2019 personal information, he and his accomplices acquired drivers\u2019 licenses in their names and paid corrupt telephone company employees for access to physicians\u2019 phone numbers, according to his plea deal.<\/p>\n
Washington and others then used the information to open sham e-prescribing accounts in the physicians\u2019 names. One member of the crime ring spoke with a pharmacy technician to learn the complexities of electronic prescriptions so the suspects could avoid detection and engender more illegal prescriptions, court papers show.<\/p>\n
Once the impostors opened the fraudulent accounts, Washington and others submitted at least 5,600 deceptive prescriptions for such narcotics as oxycodone and promethazine with codeine, according to the plea agreement.<\/p>\n
The suspects then traveled to drugstores across the United States, including pharmacies within Los Angeles and Orange counties, to pick up the illegally prescribed drugs, which they resold for \u201csignificant\u201d profits, the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Maryland man who ran a fraud scheme in which he impersonated doctors to create bogus e-prescribing accounts…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":344486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,14206,229821,2961,224,5337,69586,229822,5332,49735],"class_list":{"0":"post-514709","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-doctors","11":"tag-impersonated","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-losangeles","15":"tag-narcotics","16":"tag-prescribe","17":"tag-prison","18":"tag-sentenced"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115891616257551951","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}