LA company to pay $22.5M after allegedly faking hundreds of Covid test results | Hacker News Reader

LA company to pay $22.5M after allegedly faking hundreds of Covid test results

abc7.com

105 pointsbruceb37 comments

Although it is true that this unscrupulous doctor dodged (for now) the state board and thus is keeping his CA medical license, note however that it is well known that even such scenario of state censure [1] will not terminate the ability of the doctor to practice medicine [2], and censure is an extremely unlikely scenario in the first place [3]

[1]State Medical Boards Receive an F for Failing to Protect Us. http://www.leiferreport.com/protecting-bad-doctors/#_edn4

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/u-s-indian-health...

[3] Brawley, How We Do Harm, pg 125.

There are a ton of these shady 'testing' sites all over the country. Some of them will just take all of your information[1], presumably for purposes of identity theft. I was visiting Houston about a year ago and I saw what I thought was such a site in a parking lot nearby where I was staying, and it was absolutely packed with people for several days, because this site was listed as a free testing location by several local news outlets.

I looked up the owner of the business; they were quite young and their only previous work history was they were the CEO of a small escape room company or something along those lines. There were some other red flags as well (though I don't remember all of them).

[1] https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2022/01/dont-assume...

If they were officially registered, I doubt they were doing it just for the data. They were probably able to file for payment for each test administered, real or fake. The data would just be icing.

Yep. Incentives drive behavior.

I had this same experience in St. Louis. Visiting for work from international so needed a negative test before returning home. I went to a small place and it was an empty storefront with Covid test signs in the window. They took my data, promised PCR results in 48 hours (which were needed for international travel to my country at the time). They didn’t send anything until maybe a month later, much too late for my flight. Looked up the company and it was a Chicago company that fit a similar description to yours. Kind of sketchy and weird, ended up going to a national chain for one within the travel window.

Faking results for tests that were never even processed is characterized as

> we failed to meet the standards for excellence our customers deserve

Emphasis mine. PR speak makes me sick.

I have been waiting more than a year for this story to come out, and all they've found is one place? I had thought it was going to be the biggest story of the pandemic. Fake tests worldwide. Governments weren't sending in positive people at random to audit, it was a choice of whatever moderate profit margin vs 100% profit. Of course there were ungodly numbers of fake results everywhere.

My friend knew his test for international travel he got in NYC was fake, and the site my hotel sent me to for a test they paid for in Cancun was to me obviously fake as well. They told me to come back in ten minutes, but I saw the negative result had been printed BEFORE my sample was even deposited by the lab assistant for testing.

Then you had the other phenomena: the 50% of American tourists without the moral scruples to care, so after having a PDF of one negative result, they'd just Photoshop the date for all future travel. I only mention American because all the people I talked to who did this regularly happened by chance to be Americans. Dunno if it was common worldwide.

> Dunno if it was common worldwide.

There was this infamous flight from South Africa to the UK in which everyone has negative results when they got on the flights and about half the people were positive when they landed.

So, this looks like a company that offered legit COVID tests, but wouldn't stop taking customers when they ran out of capacity -- they just started producing fake results when they got more customers than they could process.

The article says that they faked 500 of the tests, out of probably tens of thousands that they ran.

Not defending the behavior or anything, just pointing out that if your narrative is looking for huge swaths of fake tests (either as proof that COVID was being downplayed or as proof that COVID was a scam), you're gonna need to look somewhere other than this story.

This is just the ordinary kind of fraud where some person didn't want to deal with having over-promised and decided that they'd sweep it under the rug consequences be damned.

The story doesn't say whether they were fake positive or negative results, but presumably they were negative, since negative test results are less likely to be questioned.

>The article says that they faked 500 of the tests

The article says that they faked at least 500 of the tests.

It also says they required customers using insurance to meet with their doctor before the COVID test. Then they billed insurance for the doctor visit. The doctor shared the revenue with the testing site.

How is this not criminal insurance fraud?

In the early days of the pandemic, many places required you to visit their doctor to get a prescription for a test before they would test you. When I caught COVID very early on, I was stuck in this boat -- I was sick with a moderate respiratory illness and I was afraid to be around anybody in case I killed them (and also I was terrified of what might happen to me -- at that time, there weren't that many well-publicized mild cases). But, I couldn't find a test that I could get on short notice.

All the "testing centers" had weeks-long waiting lists for tests. But my friendly neighborhood urgent care would give me a same day appointment (test results in 3-5 days). I drove to the clinic, sat in my car outside, did a virtual doctor visit where I described my symptoms, they approved the test, and sent a nurse in many masks to come administer the test car-side.

By executive order, the test itself was free to me (if I presented an insurance card, they could bill the insurance, if I was a "cash patient" it had to be actually free) but they could and did charge their usual price for the doctor's visit. At the time, my employer had a special covid-response program where virtual doctor visits were all covered 100% so it cost me nothing anyway, but the clinic did bill my employer for the visit (and the test).

In NYC there were tons of "testing sites" on the street, many of which felt extremely sketchy. I took one, the administration was so sloppy I worried both about cross-contamination and that the swab was barely in my nose, also did not help the wind was blowing everything all over the street. We got no receipt or anything, then over a week later I got an email saying it was negative on the most bare-bones site you can imagine.

During this time they made multiple attempts to charge insurance totaling almost $1000 for various generic sounding services, none of which mentioned COVID.

I can’t believe they were just fined. Can’t California revoke a license or something here?

They should probably go to jail assuming the "system" is unbiased.

More importantly why aren't the owners going to jail for a long time? This is no different than sneaking into a bank at night and stealing $22.5mm

A similar story is playing out in NYC with a company called CareCube. They advertise and verbally tell patients that the test is free, and then later charge them by adding on spurious things onto their bill.

Fucking scumbags, both.

Isn't life nice for corporates. Poor schmuck ends up in jail for not having a money to pay vagrancy related ticked while corporate fraudsters walk free.

There is a much larger player that did this on a much larger scale (100-1000x) in April-May 2020 in California and some neighboring states and the story has never been told because they did it with the blessing of the state.

Could you share that name, then?

Of course this person doesn’t cite any sources because it’s convenient to spread misinformation and fear. Unfortunately even on HN, misinformation and FUD is prevalent.

I’m going to take a guess and say that they are referring to Curative, a startup who came under fire for having a test that too often reported false negatives most likely because they conducted the tests with mouth swabs instead of nasal ones.

Anecdotally, I went to a Curative site in Los Angeles when I suspected that I had COVID in 2020 and received results from one their free (gov paid for) testing sites, so despite issues with the tests and the company notwithstanding, I got a positive result and it provided a valuable service to me. I wonder why the story “hasn’t been told”? Maybe because there’s not some giant conspiracy.

Read about it: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-07-16/fda-revoke...

No. I don't even think Curative was around in April 2020 or at least not doing covid tests. Tests were in very short supply back then.

Quest in SLO.

I can't tell if this is just the LA one or other sites? I've been to the one in San Diego multiple times. Now I wonder...

If it can be tied to a death then the perpetrators should get life in prison with no chance of parole.

Were these test results reported in the official stats ?

Would falsifying Covid tests in 2020 (given exponential spread) likely lead to someone dying?

It boggles me why the US is one of the only developed countries still not to have national standards for PKI-authenticated vaccination and test records.

(Why am I being downvoted?)

PKI doesn’t really help here. The test results weren’t hacked. Essentially an authorized issuer of certificates was itself a bad actor.

One of the features of PKI is that you can revoke the certificate of the malicious issuing authority itself in such cases.

That would be true if the results were 100% computer generated. There are bunch of people behind the computers typing stuff for these reports. User input is the culprit.

What problem does revoking an old covid test solve?

Right now it's trivially easy to fake a paper test cert or CDC vax card and no one can verify them at scale without QR/digital signatures.

If an authority was found to be issuing false test results then revoking the issuer's own signing cert by the next level authority, eg the state health department will solve that trust issue.

PKI solves other problems but not this one, where people wanted a valid test but the testing facility cheated.

Invalidating historical tests isn’t particularly valuable. After they’re more than a few days old the result rarely matter nor be subject to scrutiny. Notifying affected patients is important but they did that just fine with PKI

People must learn that everything is used as a pretense, whether a real issue or not. When we next encounter a pandemic, we should insist on DIY, home, tests that we don't expose people to, but only require a specimen. We can't afford to trust liars again.

>we should insist on DIY, home, tests that we don't expose people to, but only require a specimen. We can't afford to trust liars again.

Wouldn't that make it even easier to fake tests? I suppose if your goal is to prevent consumers from being scammed (ie. they think they got a real test but they got a fake negative result) that's fine, but the issue here seems to be consumers wanting a fake test so they can travel.

There was (and still is) an overfocus on travel for controlling covid, especially when it was clear that it was so contagious that anything but total isolation wasn't gonna cut it. For instance, cutting South Africa off the map because they detected Omicron first (which in turn happened largely because they're excellent at infectious decrease tracking, it's not even clear it developed there). Or when the US was blanket restricting travel from countries that had way less covid cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com