PI Newswire

Johnson & Johnson will pay $158 million to settle Texas’ complaint of Medicaid fraud, ending a trial in Travis County Court that began on Jan. 10.

State prosecutors said Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals pushed Risperdal for off-label uses, to treat children and adults for schizophrenia and dementia, though the FDA had not approved it for that. Johnson & Johnson also “downplayed the harmful side effects of this drug,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a statement announcing the settlement.

Physicians are allowed to prescribe drugs for off-lable uses, but drug companies are not allowed to push their drugs for that.

The state said its Medicaid program overpaid pharmacies that dispensed Risperdal to Medicaid patients for unapproved uses.

Prosecutors said it was the Medicaid overbilling case to go to trial in the state. ActavisGroup went to a trial in early 2011. It settled with the state in December for $84 million.

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The Better Business Bureau is warning about an identity theft scam targeting Medicare recipients.

The agency said the latest fraud attempt involves calling Medicare consumers. The caller states that they want to send the consumer a “new Medicare card”. They then go over the consumer’s personal information and eventually ask for a checking account number.

The Better Business Bureau said this is not a legitimate phone call.

“We don’t contact the consumer regarding new cards; the consumer would need to contact us,” Medicare officials said.

Consumers are advised to follow these tips:

Verify a source before sharing information.
Safeguard your medical and health insurance information.
Treat your trash carefully.

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A report has found workplace fraud is costing Canada’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) at least $3.2 billion a year – probably much more – and is hurting employee morale, just as the authors of the report say the problem is growing.

About 290,000 SMEs were victims of one or more instances of work-place fraud in the past year, says a Certified General Accountants Association of Canada (CGA-Canada) study.

Tim Houghton, vice-president of risk solutions for CKR Global Risk Solutions in Calgary, says 75 per cent of all employee-related crimes – theft, fraud, assaults and others – go unnoticed.

Houghton says a company is 15 times more likely to have an employee steal from an employer versus a non-employee. “If you consider that 75 per cent (of all crimes) go unreported, then that $3.2 billion is actually a quarter of the actual loss,” he says.

“It has a huge impact, both financially and non-financially, for most (SMEs).”

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Cybercrime is on the rise, up 10% from 2009. In fact, PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that nearly half of all businesses had been a victim of fraud in the past year. For small businesses, these attacks can be especially harmful to your bottom line, putting your clients’ personal data at risk and threatening to take systems down for days at a time. Below are a few ways cybercrime can affect your business in 2012:

Website compromising.

Website hacking is dangerous because it can influence the way your clients see you. When PBS’s website was compromised in 2011, hackers not only posted a fake news story about deceased rapper Tupac Shakur, they released usernames and passwords for PBS affiliates. SonyPictures.com also suffered an attack last summer in which usernames and passwords were leaked. In both cases, outdated software and security measures were blamed, but it was also noted that many of the passwords being used were surprisingly simple. Small businesses should set strict password standards, enforced server-wide. As recommended by Microsoft, passwords should be at least six characters long and contain a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters.

Keylogging.

Imagine someone having a printout of everything you type, every time you log in to your computer. That’s what keylogging does and it’s one of the ways hackers can gain entry into your system. This is an especially dangerous hack, since it can allow outside entities to gain access to your customers’ credit card data, bank account info, and social security numbers, in addition to the passwords to your business’s databases and in-house software. Keylogging software can either be installed through a virus or directly installed by someone gaining inside access to your computer systems. It is important that small businesses keep all virus definitions up to date and make sure software applications like Java and Adobe Flash are consistently up to date on every PC and laptop in your organization. Having outdated versions of these applications can leave you open to vulnerabilities.

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Two men who defrauded two aboriginal organizations of almost $1 million were sent to jail today.

B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen sentenced Craig Morrison to two years in jail and handed an 18-month jail sentence to his accomplice, Dennis Wells.

The men pleaded guilty last year to two counts of fraud over $5,000 after being caught siphoning off money from the Aboriginal Council of B.C. and the B.C. Aboriginal Fisheries Commission.

Morrison, 34, was the bookkeeper for the two organizations and diverted the funds to his cousin, Wells, over a three-year period,.

The judge decided the magnitude and lengthy duration of the crimes required jail time and rejected the urgings of defence lawyers to impose conditional sentences, which would have allowed the men to serve their time under house arrest.

The Crown called for a four-year jail term for Morrison and a two-and-a-half to three-year jail term for Wells.

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In just two months, private investigators found nearly a half-million dollars in overpayments and cost savings in two state aid programs for the needy in Milwaukee County, with much more expected to be added up in the coming weeks.

The findings of fraud in public food assistance and health care programs come after budget cuts left such investigations painfully neglected in many parts of the state, including Milwaukee County – the state’s largest urban area. For the past year, the Journal Sentinel has been reporting about fraud and other problems in the FoodShare program.

The contractor looked at 111 suspicious cases in FoodShare and Medicaid health programs such as BadgerCare Plus and found overpayments in every case.

So far, the total overpayments have been tallied up in only 62 of those cases, or just over half. But the total overpayments and future cost savings will likely come close to $1 million when it’s all added up, with most of that due to fraud, said Ed O’Brien, who heads the investigative firm O’Brien & Associates.

“It’s long overdue,” O’Brien said of the state’s decision to restore fraud investigations in Milwaukee. “Any program where you’re to give out something (of value), you’ve got to have checks and balances.”

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A disgraced South African doctor who was banned from practising in the UK after a string of medical misconduct, fraud and sexual harassment complaints against him has resurfaced again working in his native country.

Dr Maurice Saadien-Raad, 63, had twice been suspended from working as a doctor in South Africa before he moved to the UK where he was employed by the NHS for four years.

He was eventually struck off by the General Medical Council in 2007 after a string of complaints against him which ran to 60 pages of charge sheets.

His whereabouts since then has remained unclear until two weeks ago, when he was asked to leave his rented medical practice in Plumstead, Cape Town by his landlord.

Dr Saadien-Raad had changed his name by deed poll to Dr Paul Fitzgerald but the landlord, according to South Africa’s Sunday Times, had become suspicious about his allegedly erratic behaviour and hired a private detective, who uncovered his true identity.

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A private investigator retained by Tottenham Hotspur who obtained West Ham vice-chairman Karren Brady’s telephone records at the height of the Olympic Stadium bidding process has been arrested on suspicion of fraud offences.

Howard Hill, a former partner at accountancy firm PKF, was arrested on Wednesday in Cheshire and taken into custody. Police searched a residential address and removed documents.

PKF and Hill, a senior corporate investigator, were engaged by Tottenham to carry out unspecified investigations at the culmination of the bidding process for the stadium, which was won by West Ham. Hill resigned from the company in December.

West Ham called in the police after an exposé appeared in the Sunday Times revealing that a director of the Olympic Park Legacy Company had undertaken paid consultancy work for the club.

The story referred to information gleaned from private telephone records, and in a civil action brought by West Ham last November PKF admitted that it did have copies of Brady’s records.

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A Harare man who purported to be operating a security firm allegedly owned by Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri and went on to defraud 58 aspiring security guards, was yesterday sentenced to three months in prison by a Mutare magistrate.

Edmore Siwela (46) was convicted by magistrate Sharon Chipanga of fraud and sentenced to three months behinds bars in a matter prosecuted by Fletcher Karombe.

It emerged during cross examination the purported firm was bogus and Siwela could not explain reasons for implicating the Police Commissioner-General.

Charges against Siwela are on July 8 last year, he advertised security guard positions in Mutare under World Security Services (Pvt) Ltd.

The firm, which he reportedly claimed had branches in Harare, Bulawayo and Gweru, wanted to open an area office in the eastern border city.

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Bombs, sex crimes, homicides, suicides, fraud and burglary. Such cases are where the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office new digital forensics investigator comes into play.

To keep up with advances in digital technology and communication — and the criminals who use them — the sheriff’s office added the digital forensics position this year, moving former narcotics investigator Vince Ziccardi into the role.

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” said Tod Goodyear, who supervises the sheriff’s criminal investigations unit. “(Criminals) are finding new ways to do things every day. They are now able to network (online) and get better at what they do.”

Ziccardi’s expertise and training to find information on computers and digital devices are a resource for fraud investigators at each precinct in the county.

“It’s nice to have that investigative background,” Goodyear said. “A lot of narcotics is transactional and organizational, so he still has that mindset that picks up things others may not see.”

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Without a hitch, Ed and Kelley Brill had filed their joint income-tax returns from the same home address for 14 years.

But this year, after obtaining an extension, the Miami Shores, Fla., couple were shocked to learn that the Internal Revenue Service had rejected their electronically filed return. It turned out that a thief had stolen Mrs. Brill’s identity, Social Security number and employer’s name, then filed a falsified refund claim — beating the Brills to the punch.

Now, they still have no idea how they were victimized and must wait six to 12 months to get their $7,918 refund. Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, the Brills are enduring a frustrating triple whammy: ID theft, tax fraud and IRS red tape.

“What gets me is, the taxpayer who was ripped off and did nothing wrong has to prove himself to the IRS,” said Mr. Brill, 50.

An IRS representative in November told the Brills that Mrs. Brill’s ID was stolen and used for the fraudulent return but said little else. “The IRS never bothered verifying anything filed by the crook who committed the crime,” said Mr. Brill. “I want to be afforded the same courtesy and efficiency that the crook was afforded by the IRS.”

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A worm previously used to commit financial fraud is now stealing Facebook login credentials, compromising at least 45,000 Facebook accounts with the goals of transmitting malicious links to victims’ friends and gaining remote access to corporate networks.

The security company Seculert has been tracking the progress of Ramnit, a worm first discovered in April 2010, and described by Microsoft as “multi-component malware that infects Windows executable files, Microsoft Office files and HTML files” in order to steal “sensitive information such as saved FTP credentials and browser cookies.” Ramnit has previously been used to “bypass two-factor authentication and transaction signing systems, gain remote access to financial institutions, compromise online banking sessions and penetrate several corporate networks,” Seculert says.

Recently, Seculert set up a sinkhole and discovered that 800,000 machines were infected between September and December. Moreover, Seculert found that more than 45,000 Facebook login credentials, mostly in the UK and France, were stolen by a new variant of the worm.

“We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims’ Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends, thereby magnifying the malware’s spread even further,” Seculert said. “In addition, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks.”

Facebook fraud, of course, is nothing new. Facebook itself has acknowledged seeing 600,000 compromised logins each day, although that accounts for just 0.06 percent of the one billion Facebook logins each day.

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