People from across the country say a Queens-based business is charging their Medicare accounts for medical supplies they never ordered or received, yet records show Medicare is coughing up tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars for the bogus claims.
CBS News New York investigative reporter Tim McNicholas first uncovered this pattern back in February 2024.
Medicare paid NYC store thousands, records show
Linda Christensen, Katherine Hensley and Jennye Keefer all say they’ve never needed anything from Almaz Med Supply on 69th Street and Queens Boulevard. In fact, Keefer and Hensley say they’ve never even been to Queens, Christensen has never heard of the store, and they all live in different states – Pennsylvania, Florida and Maryland.
So imagine their surprise when they discovered Medicare claims in their names for thousands of dollars worth of orders from the store.
The women shared account records showing Medicare paid the store $13,000 between March and June, $6,300 between December and April, and a separate $6,300 payment in January. The payments were all for wound dressings, glucose monitors for diabetes and catheters that they say they never received or needed.
“If there was a way to notify me and say, ‘Hey Mrs. Keefer, sorry to hear about your diabetes,’ I would have said, ‘What are you talking about?'” Keefer said.
“The question that comes into my mind is how did they get my Medicare number and how did this get through?” Hensley said.
Claire Rosenzweig, of the Better Business Bureau, says her team has fielded eight other similar complaints about the company since last fall.
“All of our personal information unfortunately is out there. And sometimes it’s hacked. There’s the dark web. There’s so many ways that fraudsters can get ahold of personal information,” she said.
Neighbor says no one ever enters, leaves store
State records show Almaz Med Supply is registered to a Zurab Tsotskhalashvili. Someone with that name listed a Brooklyn apartment building as their address last year in an unrelated lawsuit, so McNicholas visited that building.
Over the callbox, an individual identified himself as Zurab Tsotskhashvili and let McNicholas into the building, but no one answered the door to the apartment inside.
When McNicholas tried the callbox again, the man repeatedly stated “I’m not Rob” and said he knew nothing about Almaz.
No one answered the door or the phone at the store. Mohammad Sarder, who lives two doors down, said that doesn’t surprise him.
“They open probably like three, four years, five years. I’m not sure exactly,” he said.
Sarder said in that time, he’s never seen anyone going in or out of the store.
McNicholas also tracked down a man who said he sold Almaz Med Supply to Tsoskhalashvili last year. The man says he started learning about fraud allegations soon after. He would not agree to an on-camera interview and directed us to his attorney, who never returned our calls.
Medicare fraud, abuse costs $60 billion per year, feds say
Last year, a CBS News New York investigation revealed another New York City business billed Medicare for millions of dollars worth of catheters that patients never requested. That story involved the same pattern:  multiple companies that changed management or owners and then had complaints about fraud.
The federal government says Medicare fraud, errors and abuse cost the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services $60 billion per year.
The Trump administration has repeatedly said it’s working to eliminate various types of fraud, but HHS and its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., didn’t respond to CBS News New York’s interview request for this story. Neither did Kennedy’s predecessor, Xavier Becerra.
HHS told us in email last year that they have ways of clawing payments back and, even if a claim publicly shows up as paid, it doesn’t necessarily mean the money went out the door — but sometimes it does, hence the annual losses.
