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Not a single positive test – that was noticed at some point. © Renate Hoyer
Two brothers were able to obtain 1.3 million euros through fictitious corona tests because there were virtually no controls at the KV. The long process has now come to an end.
Two brothers from Roßdorf (Darmstadt-Dieburg district) pocketed around 1.3 million euros with fabricated negative corona tests. During the trial before the Darmstadt Regional Court, the brothers admitted to around 480,000 fake and wrongly billed tests. They had registered a further four million euros with the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KV) in Hesse, but were not paid out because they became suspicious.
On Thursday, the brothers received their comeuppance for their joint fraud worth millions: The Darmstadt Regional Court sentenced the 31-year-old to three and a half years in prison and his 27-year-old brother to three years and two months in prison.
Fraudsters have already served more than half of their sentence in custody
Since the two had already been in custody for 21 months – the defense attorney’s original statement: “Custody in custody is ten times harder because there is no parole” – they were able to go home without handcuffs after the trial. However, they had to hand over their identification documents, report to a police station twice a week and are not allowed to leave the country. If the verdict becomes final, they will still have to serve time in prison. The proceedings for the confiscation of the fraudulent profits have been separated; they will only be decided later by way of a court order without a further trial.
From September 2021 to June 2022, the brothers operated 27 testing centers in Darmstadt and southern Hesse. At first, the tests were carried out legally, but then they programmed source codes and created a database from which tests could be generated at will, using the names and addresses of people who had actually been tested.
KV made the fraud easy for the accused brothers
The fraud was discovered, among other things, when the brothers wanted to bill for almost 10,000 corona tests from the test station in Brensbach in the Odenwald, a town of 5,000 inhabitants, and not a single positive test was found.
The two Rossdorf residents had “exploited an emergency situation to enrich themselves,” said the prosecutor. However, the health insurance company made it quite easy for them, said presiding judge Felix Diefenbacher in his justification for the verdict. “Easier than ordering from Amazon.” The defendants only had to enter the test location and the number of tests in an online portal, then they received the reimbursement from the health insurance company – without any verification. “The money had to be paid out quickly because the service providers had to buy the test kits and thus pay in advance,” said the judge.
“The way the KV behaved, the money was lying on the street”
The brothers’ basic idea was a laudable one; they had “helped a large number of people and the system,” said the defense. But then they succumbed to the lure of quick money. “The way the KV behaved, the money was lying on the street.”
The verdict is based on an agreement between the court, the public prosecutor and the defense. It was relatively lenient because the two defendants have no previous convictions and confessed during the proceedings, which began in March. The law provides for a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
