By Forum Staff
An indictment was unsealed on Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court charging a former Long Island business owner with conspiring to commit health care fraud, violating the federal Anti-Kickback Statute, conspiring to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute and money laundering conspiracy.
Oleg Beretsky, 67, was arrested Tuesday morning in Naples, Fla.
As alleged in court filings, from January 2017 to April 2024, Beretsky and co-conspirators engaged in a health care fraud, kickback and money laundering scheme. Beretsky was the owner of Obest, Inc., a company in Plainview, New York, that purported to provide health care professionals with billing, consulting and support services. In reality, Obest’s principal business consisted of referring elderly Medicare patients to doctors and other health care professionals in exchange for kickbacks and bribes. Many of these patients were immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who Beretsky identified through an employee of a nonprofit social service agency that provided housing and other services to senior citizens in Brooklyn and Queens. Beretsky cultivated relationships with many of these patients, which he used to gain control over decisions regarding their health care providers. Beretsky then used that control to ensure that only doctors and other providers—including social workers, pain specialists and diagnostic companies—who were willing to pay him would have access to the patients. On at least one occasion, Beretsky threatened a patient who wanted to continue seeing a provider who had stopped paying illegal kickbacks to the defendant.
The fee charged by Beretsky was typically based either on how many patients Beretsky referred to the provider or how much Medicare reimbursed the provider for services purportedly rendered to the patients. To generate more fees for himself and his co-conspirators, Beretsky often encouraged or directed providers to bill Medicare for patients who did not need the services those providers rendered, and in some cases, services that were not rendered at all. In total, doctors and providers who participated in Beretsky’s scheme billed more than $22 million in false and fraudulent claims to Medicare. Of that more than $22 million, Medicare paid more than $12.4 million in claims, which was distributed to Beretsky and his co-conspirators. To hide the illegal source of funds Beretsky received from the conspiracy, Beretsky frequently directed co-conspirators to pay his relatives in cash and transferred money to multiple accounts held in the names of his family members.
“As alleged, elderly individuals trusted the defendant to help them with their health care decisions. Rather than look out for the interests of some of the most vulnerable members of our community, he sold access to those who trusted him to the highest bidder,” said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney John Durham. “The defendant compounded his crimes by encouraging doctors and health care providers who became part of his scheme to cheat Medicare by billing for work that was not needed or never performed.”
If convicted of the charges, Beretsky faces up to up to 20 years in prison on the money laundering conspiracy count; up to 10 years each on the health care fraud conspiracy and kickback counts; and up to five years on the kickback conspiracy count.
