Paul Mansour, a California pharmacist and co-owner of Best Buy Drugs in Sierra Madre, pleaded guilty to fraud.
Mr. Mansour created fake patient profiles to duplicate prescriptions and then submitted false claims, billing Medicare for the medications under the names of actual patients, according to an April 5 news release from the Justice Department.
"Between January 2017 and June 2022, Mansour caused Medicare to pay the pharmacy between approximately $600,000 and over $1 million as a result of the submission of false and fraudulent claims," the release said.
He is scheduled to be sentenced in June and could face up to 10 years in prison.
This is the second pharmacist-related fraud case to come to a head in California this week. On April 3, Sandy Mai Trang Nguyen was found guilty on 21 fraud counts and sentenced to 180 months in prison.