SPRING HILL, Tenn. (WTVF) — The owner and CEO of Crestar Labs, LLC was charged Friday with aiding and abetting a Medicare billing scheme centered around genetic testing in cancer patients.
Fadel Alshalabi, 53, was arrested by federal agents on Sunday evening in Chicago, and he will face charges in Middle Tennessee for his Spring Hill-based company's violation of the anti-kickback statute.
Alshalabi is accused of, as early as 2016, engaging in a scheme to pay illegal health care kickbacks and bribes in exchange for doctor's orders and genetic tests, regardless of medical necessity, from Medicare beneficiaries.
The scheme targeted and recruited elderly patients who were federal health care program beneficiaries.
Marketers who were not health care officials collected mouth swabs of the patients at nursing homes and senior health fairs. Then, telemedicine doctors approved tests, without any treatments of — or, often, without any interactions with — the patients.
Often, neither the patients nor their treating physicians received the results of their tests.
From late 2017 to mid-2022, Crestar billed Medicare approximately $86 million for genetic testing and was paid almost $14 million for those claims.
Alshalabi also owned Karemore Labs in Baltimore, Maryland and Martis Labs and CrestarDX in Dallas, Texas. If convicted, he will face up to 10 years in prison.
