A former nurse practitioner in Butte, Montana, has been sentenced to five years in prison for falsely billing approximately $62 million to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana for vitamin B-12 injections.
Tristan Svejkovsky, 41, was accused of submitting fraudulent claims for 158 vitamin B-12 injections that never occurred, resulting in the theft of $613,108, according to a Jan. 15 news release from the Department of Justice.
The Montana Board of Nursing suspended Ms. Svejkovsky’s license on April 1, 2022. However, she continued prescribing controlled substances until June 2022. Even after being contacted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, she used the credentials of a nurse practitioner friend — misleading the friend by claiming she was on probation rather than suspended — to continue issuing prescriptions.
The fraud began in August 2021, when Ms. Svejkovsky inflated insurance claims by increasing the units of vitamin B-12 injections from one to 1,000, boosting payments from $4.88 to $4,880 per injection. Despite her license suspension, she continued the scheme, ultimately billing $62.3 million in fraudulent claims and stealing over $613,000.