Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News (b)
A search warrant and cooperation from inside the practice showed more evidence. But investigators needed proof Perwaiz was willfully lying to his patients.
They found it when a young woman in her early 20s went to Perwaiz for care in 2019. He told her she had uterine fibroids that needed to be removed immediately. But the staff in Perwaiz’s practice knew the woman’s ultrasound was normal.
So, investigators from the FBI and Defense Criminal Investigative Service approached the patient. Would she be willing to record her next phone call with Perwaiz?
While secretly being taped, Perwaiz boldly lied to his patient, telling her she had “big” tumors that needed to come out through abdominal surgery.
“He was great at exploiting patients,” Maxwell said. “He used fear of cancer, or, in other cases, fear of infertility to convince them to go through with surgery.”
Maxwell noted that Perwaiz often exploited the same woman multiple times, telling her something was concerning in her first surgery, and he needed to do more surgeries.
One helpful aspect of a health care fraud investigation is that insurance providers require paperwork to reimburse medical providers. To get reimbursed, Perwaiz created duplicate records. One was a patient’s actual medical record, and the other was a false one claiming the need for surgery—essentially, a detailed paper trail of the crime. In one case, Perwaiz forgot to shred the real medical record, another strong piece of evidence.
A jury found Perwaiz guilty on 52 counts of health care fraud in November 2020. In May 2021, he was sentenced to 59 years in prison. Prosecutors proved his crimes happened at least between 2010 and 2019, but women came forward from decades ago claiming victimization by Perwaiz. Numerous victims testified at trial to the harm Perwaiz had caused them.
The case was a rewarding one for the investigative team, knowing that Perwaiz did physical and emotional harm to dozens of women.
“It’s impossible not to get emotional when you hear these women’s stories. It’s horrible what he did to them,” Maxwell said. “It’s a shame he got away with this for so long, but knowing he will never touch another woman is a huge sense of accomplishment.”