Quality & complianceOfficial

Florida DME owner convicted over $8.6m Medicare orthotic brace fraud scheme

🇺🇸 US Department of Justice · Tue 27 Oct 2026

A federal jury found Sophie Dufort guilty of conspiracy, health care fraud and kickback offences involving forged or purchased prescriptions for braces that beneficiaries did not want or need.

A federal jury in the Middle District of Florida has convicted Sophie Dufort, 57, of Gainesville, who owned a durable medical equipment (DME) company and managed several others. The US Department of Justice said the scheme led to more than $8.6m in fraudulent claims to Medicare.

According to court documents and trial evidence cited by the DOJ, Dufort conspired with Paula Pirone, 70, of Ocala, and others to bill Medicare on the basis of fake prescriptions for orthotic braces. The prescriptions were bought from purported marketing companies that used high-pressure telemarketing to obtain beneficiaries' details. Those companies either paid practitioners to sign prescriptions without contacting or evaluating patients, or used stolen doctors' credentials to forge them, before selling them on to the DME companies.

Braces were then shipped to beneficiaries who, the DOJ said, did not want or need them and had not been examined by a doctor. A medical expert told the trial that using these combinations of braces could be "very dangerous" for the elderly Medicare population. Beneficiaries who complained and wanted to return braces were told to get rid of them or pass them on, so that Medicare would not have to be repaid.

Dufort was convicted of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud, two counts of health care fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to offer and pay illegal kickbacks, and one count of offering and paying illegal kickbacks. The maximum sentence is 20 years for the first conspiracy count, 10 years for each health care fraud and kickback count, and five years for the second conspiracy count. Sentencing is scheduled for January 2027, with a judge to weigh the US Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

The case was investigated by HHS-OIG and the FBI, and is being prosecuted by the Fraud Division's Health Care Fraud Section and the US Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida. The DOJ said its Health Care Fraud Strike Force Program, now nine strike forces, has charged more than 6,200 defendants who billed federal health care programmes and private insurers more than $45bn since 2007.

What it means for your team

  • The case has no direct pharmacovigilance, labelling or product-safety requirements, so its relevance to PV and QA teams is limited to awareness of enforcement trends.
  • Market-access and compliance teams working with US federal programmes should note the continued focus on fraudulent prescriptions, telemarketing lead generation and kickbacks in DME billing.
  • The expert testimony on potential harm from inappropriate brace combinations shows that prosecutors can link fraud to patient-safety risk, even where no product defect is alleged.

Official source: US Department of Justice ↗

Article written by VigiEye from the official source (US Department of Justice). AI-assisted; check the source before acting.

More Quality & compliance All →