Idaho Physician Sentenced in Telemedicine Medicare Fraud Scheme

Federal prosecutors have spent years pursuing a specific kind of health care fraud that rides on the infrastructure of telehealth: telemarketers recruit Medicare patients, a telemedicine company routes orders to a physician, and that physician signs off on tests or equipment that Medicare then pays for. A sentencing in the Eastern District of Washington this month put concrete numbers on one such scheme.

What the physician was convicted of doing

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Washington, Dr. David Antonio Becerril, a physician who practiced in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, took part in a telemarketing health care fraud conspiracy. A jury convicted him on September 29, 2025, on 16 felony counts spanning conspiracy, health care fraud, wire fraud, and false statements related to health care matters.

Prosecutors said the scheme ran from February 2018 through September 2019 and centered on orders for genetic tests and orthotic braces that were billed to Medicare. Court records identified a telemedicine company, Real Time Physicians LLC, as the entity that routed orders to Becerril for signature.

The evidence described a physician signing orders for patients he had never seen or spoken with. Prosecutors said he spent about 26 seconds on average reviewing each order before signing it, and was paid roughly $20 per order. According to trial evidence reported in local coverage, some orders were written for patients who had already died, and braces were ordered for people who had no limbs.

The sentence

On July 8, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Stanley A. Bastian sentenced Becerril to 40 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. The court ordered him to pay $1,250,667.19 in restitution and to forfeit $37,340. The statutory maximum for the counts of conviction had been considerably higher.

How telefraud schemes are structured

Federal enforcement agencies have described a recurring pattern in these cases, often labeled telefraud. It generally works in three steps: a telemarketing operation contacts Medicare beneficiaries, frequently with offers of free or low cost genetic tests or braces; a telemedicine company collects the beneficiary information and generates orders; and a physician signs those orders, sometimes in volume and with little or no interaction with the patient. Laboratories or equipment suppliers then bill Medicare, and the proceeds are shared across the chain.

The telehealth layer matters to prosecutors because it supplies the physician signature that makes a claim look legitimate. That is very different from a telehealth visit a patient seeks out for their own care.

Why this matters for telehealth patients

Cases like this are prosecuted as fraud against Medicare, not as evidence that telehealth itself is illegitimate. Legitimate telehealth starts with the patient, involves a real clinical evaluation, and produces orders tied to that evaluation. The conduct at issue here, by contrast, started with a marketer and ended with a signature detached from any genuine patient encounter.

For readers choosing an online provider, the useful takeaway is not to avoid telehealth, but to understand the difference between care you initiate and an unsolicited offer that arrives by phone or text.

Signs of a telefraud pitch

This is general information, not legal or medical advice, but federal agencies have repeatedly flagged a few common markers of these schemes:

• An unsolicited call, text, or ad offering free genetic testing, DNA cancer screening, or braces, especially if it asks for your Medicare number.
• Pressure to accept tests or equipment you did not ask about and your own clinician did not recommend.
• A doctor you never actually speak with signing off on orders in your name.
• Marketers who stress that the item is free or fully covered by Medicare.

The broader enforcement picture

The Becerril case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, the agency that leads much of the government's health care fraud work. It fits a multi year federal effort against telemarketing-driven billing schemes that has produced numerous prosecutions of marketers, laboratory owners, and signing physicians. For patients and for the telehealth industry, the through line is accountability: the signature at the center of these cases is exactly where enforcement now focuses.