Under the Collar

The COVID-19 crisis has created a great deal of anxiety among the public and cybercriminals are hoping to profit as a result. The FBI recently issued a warning to be on the lookout for scammers due to a major uptick in Coronavirus-related cybercrime. While it's unfortunate that we have to be on guard at a time like this, the good news is that there are steps that you and your business can take to avoid becoming a victim.

Phishing emails

Be wary of emails that claim to have a treatment or cure for the disease. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved a vaccine or pill to treat the ...

In January, the Fourth Circuit became the sixth Circuit Court in the country to hold that the crime of identity theft does not require the use of a living person’s identity.  In United States v. George, No. 19-4125 (Jan. 9, 2020), the United States appealed a district court’s dismissal of an aggravated identity theft charge where the defendant had used the identification of a deceased individual to purchase a home. 

Unlike regular identity theft, which punishes the unlawful use of another’s means of identification with a sliding scale of maximum potential terms of imprisonment ...

The United States Justice Department takes health care fraud seriously and has for many years. Several years ago, when I was still a federal prosecutor, I attended a conference on the topic at the National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina. There, I heard about the biggest cases coming out of Detroit and South Florida and the analytical tools that were being used in what were the hotspots for health care fraud in America. I brought those strategies back with me to West Virginia and began using them to identify outliers, or those doctors who were billing in amounts that were ...

The opioid epidemic expands its reach every day while lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors grow exponentially. By now, most of us are aware of the theory of liability of the pharmaceutical companies:  misrepresentations about the advantages and risks of prescription opioids combined with an aggressive marketing scheme resulted in mass overprescribing and addiction. One offshoot of the opioid crisis is the urgent need for viable recovery solutions on the individual level. One of these solutions is medication-assisted treatment – fighting drugs with drugs ...

As America struggles to find solutions to the drug epidemic, our nation’s top law enforcement officer has focused his efforts on pursuing health care professionals involved in the improper prescribing of controlled substances and opioid-related health care fraud. U.S. Attorney General William Barr (and Jeff Sessions before him) has added dozens of prosecutors to support the initiative and this has led to an uptick in federal indictments. The FBI, DEA, FDA, HHS, IRS and U.S. Postal Inspectors are also involved in this effort to aggressively investigate and prosecute physicians ...

With the Department of Justice placing increased scrutiny upon the prescribing practices of physicians, it’s important to understand the burden federal prosecutors face when bringing these cases. My time as United States Attorney taught me that cases against medical professionals are brought only after a tremendous amount of time has been spent reviewing medical records, interviewing witnesses, analyzing billing data and, oftentimes, conducting undercover operations. These cases are especially challenging for a prosecutor because a doctor has a license to prescribe ...

Appalachia is ground zero for our nation’s substance abuse crisis. Communities in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere find themselves firmly in the grips of addiction and they’re searching for solutions to this epidemic. Last year, more than 68,000 people died from an overdose in America. Illicitly manufactured fentanyl and other synthetic opioids caused the majority of these deaths, but methamphetamine use is surging and someday soon could become our most dangerous threat.

The genesis of today’s drug crisis can be traced to the overprescribing of narcotics in the ...