April 21, 2022
A postal worker in New Jersey is facing federal health care fraud charges after she allegedly produced and sold about 400 counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
Lisa Hammell, 39, of Turnersville, is among 21 people charged in nine separate federal court cases led by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a crackdown on schemes that exploited the coronavirus pandemic.
Hammell allegedly advertised her fake vaccine cards on social media, promising buyers that she would customize them to include their names, dates of birth, and fake dates and locations for vaccines. To accept payments, Hammell would use an unnamed app and have her customers reference made-up memos, such as "dinner drinks" and "greeting cards," according to charging documents.
Hammell began selling the cards in March 2021, charging anywhere from $20 to $100 per card, and would print the fake documents at the U.S. post office where she worked in Marlton.
Investigators obtained messages Hammell exchanged with buyers in which she bragged about her "graphic design degree paying off."
"(W)hennnnnn has modern medicine or our government individually done anything for our own good?" Hammell allegedly wrote to one of her buyers, who had complained about living in a society full of "sheep" getting vaccinated.
Among the buyers of Hammell's fake vaccine cards, the charging documents mentioned one federal employee in Virginia who got a card for his or her mother, a hospital worker who was required to be vaccinated for her job.
The nine total federal cases cover over $149 million in COVID-19-related false billings to federal programs and theft from federally-funded pandemic assistance programs, in addition to prosecution against multiple individuals accused of manufacturing and selling fake vaccine cards. The Justice Department seized about $8 million in cash and other fraud proceeds.
Six other New Jersey residents — Abid Syed, Tariq Din, Tamer Mohamed, Abdul Rauf, Tauqir Khan, and Nisim Davydov — were charged by criminal complaint with conspiracy to violate the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute for their roles in an alleged scheme to defraud Medicare.
The defendents allegedly paid illegal kickbacks and bribes of over $250,000 for laboratory pathogen tests for COVID-19 through a Parsippany-based lab called Metpath. The company allegedly tried to conceal kickback payments made to marketers through a series of shell companies.
Hammell is charged by indictment with an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States and related fraud offenses in connection with the manufacture and sale of fake vaccine cards.
“This COVID-19 health care fraud enforcement action involves extraordinary efforts to prosecute some of the largest and most wide-ranging pandemic frauds detected to date,” said Kevin Chambers, director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement at the Justice Department. “The scale and complexity of the schemes prosecuted today illustrates the success of our unprecedented interagency effort to quickly investigate and prosecute those who abuse our critical health care programs.”
