After being found guilty of a variety of fraudulent offenses, including Medicaid fraud, COVID-19 alleviation frauds, and money laundering, a behavioral health care provider in Charlotte was given a term of more than 11 years in jail. Ashley Nicole Cross, 42, was sentenced to 135 months in prison, a mandatory three-year supervised release, and $481,436.08 in restitutions, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina, which was announced by U.S. Attorney Dena J. King.
From 2016 to 2021, Cross, the owner and operator of Odyssey Health Group (OHG) in Charlotte, fraudulently billed South Carolina Medicaid for treatments that were never provided. She occasionally submitted bills to the health program for almost 19 hours of individual counseling in a single day. Following an inquiry, it was discovered that Cross had, “to carry out the scheme,” as described in court filings, used the personal identifying information of Medicaid patients to submit false claims totaling more than $1.2 million. Following an FBI investigation, all 21 Medicaid beneficiaries contacted confirmed that neither Cross nor OHG provided them with mental health care.
The notification of the sentence was made today by Stephanie G. Opet, Director of the South Carolina Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, and Robert M. DeWitt, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Charlotte Division. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, court documents showed that Cross’s fraudulent activities were so integrated into OHG’s operations that it was impossible for the investigators to discern between fake and authentic statements.
Cross received more than $287,000 in COVID-19 relief payments as a result of the scheme, which also involved her filing for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans with false statements regarding the payroll expenses and employee counts of her enterprises. Additionally, during her trial, Cross tried to thwart justice by contacting witnesses and urging them to provide false testimony on her behalf. During the sentence phase, the court took these direct witness tampering activities into consideration.
Both the Office of the Attorney General of South Carolina and the Office of the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration provided significant support to the investigation into Cross’s offenses. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael E. Savage and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristina Fleisch spearheaded the case’s prosecution. Cross is presently being held by the federal government as he awaits his relocation to a specific federal institution.
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