A Dallas pharmacy owner was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison this week for a scheme to defraud health insurance companies by ordering millions of dollars in fake prescriptions.
Ivor Jallah, 37, was sentenced for conspiracy to commit health care fraud. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay also ordered him to pay over $41 million in restitution.
Jallah and his business partner, Shannon Turley, 46, admitted to ripping off insurance companies with phony prescriptions for headache sprays and pain and scar creams beginning in 2017, according to federal court documents. Turley is scheduled for sentencing in November.
The pair, who lived in Collin County, owned at least nine pharmacies in North Texas and the Houston area, including Preferred RX, EZ Pharmacy, Avenue H Pharmacy and Wallis Pharmacy. Court documents say the pair paid “marketers” to solicit information for insured patients, some of whom were aware of the scheme and received fees and others who were oblivious.
They used used the money to buy real estate and luxury vehicles, including a 2017 Bentley Bentayga, a 2016 Mercedes Benz and a lakefront lot in Kaufman County.
“By billing for prescription medication patients never needed nor received, these defendants brazenly lined their pockets at the expense of each and every client who paid into health insurance,” U.S. Attorney Leigha Simonton said in a written statement. “Health care is already a significant expense for many Americans. We cannot and will not allow pharmacy operators to abuse the system in this way.”
As part of the scheme, pharmacy employees added patient information onto pre-populated prescriptions pads. In some cases, they paid physicians to fraudulently stamp prescription forms when they had not seen patients. In others, they used physicians’ stamps without their knowledge.
Initially, the pharmacies shipped out a fraction of the medications they billed to insurance, but at some point Jallah stopped shipping any medication billed to insurance, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a news release.
When insurance companies conducted audits to determine whether prescription claims were legitimate, Jallah and Turley fabricated drug purchase invoices to support the claims they submitted to insurance, the release says.
Jallah also directed pharmacy employees to create fake prescription delivery logs and directed the “marketers” to ask patients to sign the logs regardless of whether they received prescriptions. In cases where the marketers could not obtain patient signatures, Jallah told pharmacy employees to forge them.
When authorities discovered what was happening, the military’s health care system, Tricare, stopped paying for the creams. The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud has said each container of pain cream can contain up to 10 different drugs, such as powerful anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants.
Over the course of the scheme, Jallah and Turley submitted at least $46 million in bogus claims to insurers, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Of those, insurance companies reimbursed $41 million.
Before he was indicted, Jallah was an independent filmmaker who co-wrote the screenplay of Grand Isle, a 2019 thriller starring Nicolas Cage. Jallah is also listed as the creator, director and writer of a 2018 comedy series called Rich Africans about two “rich Africans” who are trying to “find their way in America.”
Jallah was at one point licensed as a pharmacy technician trainee, and Turley was a pharmacy technician before her license expired in 2019, state records show.
Eight defendants have already pleaded guilty to charges associated with the pharmacy fraud and been sentenced to a combined 24 years in prison, the attorney’s office said.
Staff writer Kevin Krause contributed to this report.
