Frank Criado, who is 33 and lives in Miami, plead guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud, receiving illegal Medicare kickbacks, and defrauding the United States Government for his part in the American Therapeutic Corporation(ATC) and American Sleep Institute(ASI) Medicare Scam.

Criado, who is scheduled to be sentenced at the end of May and could face up to 15 years in prison, as well as a quarter of a million in fines, admitted in court that as a patient broker for ATC and ASI, and their parent company Medlink Professional Management Group INC, he received payments for each day that a patient he referred used ATC’s partial hospitalization program.

Criado, according to court records, was responsible for over seven million in Medicare Fraud, receiving illegal kickbacks in return for recruiting patients for ATC and ASI.

As part of the widespread medicare fraud scam, which was allegedly responsible for more than $200 million in fraudulent claims, patients were enrolled in mental health programs, called partial hospitalization programs, or PHPs. The premise of the programs offered by ATC and ASI was that patients would receive a high level of mental health treatment, with ASI offering sleep tests.

However, the PHPs were typically not medically necessary and not valid mental health programs, with ATC and ASI instead paying doctors, half-way house owners, patient recruiters, and Medicare recipients kickbacks to get Medicare recipients to attend the programs. ATC and ASI, along with their parent company Medlink, would then bill Medicare for the unnecessary and non-qualifying treatments. Kickbacks were paid to referring agents and, in some cases, the actual Medicare patients.

The case against American Therapeutic Corporation and others involved with the scam is ongoing and allegedly involved a large number of individuals in the Florida area. So far, over ten people have plead guilty, with more trials scheduled in April.