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Combining the talents of investigators from the California Department of Insurance, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the State Franchise Tax Board, the US Postal Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service resulted in a 24-count felony complaint against Hossein Ali Motamedi and Amir Zamyad.
Motamedi and Zamyad face charges of filing false tax returns, failure to file a corporate tax return, conspiracy to make illegal referrals, money laundering, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and insurance fraud.
While neither of the men had any specialized legal or medical training, they ran medical and legal offices and made claims for services that were never provided. Their clientele included participants in staged automobile insurance claims and bogus workers’ compensation claims.
Motamedi and Zamyad did not confine their operations to California. Some of the nine law offices and 17 medical clinics were located in Florida, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
As is often the case, it was a single added straw that broke the camel’s back. The suspects branched out to include a photocopy service, one that charged insurance companies approximately $250 to copy the alleged medical records. The scam called for sending assistants to the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board to copy information from other nonrelated claims files. They then charged these insurers for work that never occurred.
Investigators have searched nearly 60 locations and discovered some very interesting things. In one search, a briefcase stuffed with $250,000 cash was found and Zamyad’s home yielded tens of thousands of dollars in cash.
Motamedi has been sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay insurance companies $10 million in restitution. Zamyad will find out his fate when he is sentenced on September 27.
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