A south suburban man who ran a COVID-19 testing site was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in federal prison for falsifying tens of thousands of tests, telling anxious patients at the height of the pandemic that they were negative when in fact many of the specimens had been tossed in the garbage.
Zishan Alvi, 46, of Inverness, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud last year, admitting in a plea agreement with prosecutors that his lab fraudulently billed for hundreds of millions of dollars in government reimbursements in 2021 and early 2022, ultimately collecting at least $14 million in illegitimate taxpayer-backed payments.
In handing down the 84-month prison term, U.S. District Judge John Tharp called Alvi’s actions a “fraud on a massive scale,” one that not only showed a shocking level of greed but also sold out the safety of the public at a time when many were seeking reassurance through testing.
“People were scrambling to get tested for COVID because they didn’t want to imperil the safety and health of the people they cared about,” Tharp said. “A negative test was like a passport, ‘You know, I tested negative. I can go see my grandma, I can go see my children with their newborn baby.’ These were people who depended on that report to govern what they could safely do and not do.”
Tharp also said he was puzzled because Alvi did not have to turn to fraud. Originally from Pakistan, Alvi had overcome a difficult childhood and an abusive father to make something of himself in the U.S., the judge noted, graduating from DePaul University and working for 14 years in real estate before opening up his lab in the early days of the pandemic.
“He saw an opportunity to start a business that was going to be both profitable and helpful. That’s admirable,” Tharp said. “Where he went wrong was the opportunity to get rich, when he saw and tried to exploit the chaos that was occurring in this country as people were scrambling for ways to address the COVID problem.” --->READ MORE HERE
Penn State students who were enrolled in classes at the beginning of the pandemic will now receive part of a $17 million class action settlement.
The university moved classes online in March of 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Students who paid tuition or other fees for the Spring 2020 semester later filed a lawsuit, claiming that the school did not provide the services that they paid for.
A court granted final approval of the settlement in February. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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