A Florida woman is facing over a decade in potential prison time after authorities say she manipulated a smartphone app to bill the state of Michigan for thousands of miles she never actually traveled.
Julie Evers, a 53-year-old from Bradenton, was hauled into East Lansing’s 54B District Court on April 11 to face a litany of felony charges. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the charges on Wednesday, detailing a scheme that allegedly exploited a program designed to help low-income patients get to their doctor appointments.
The state’s Medicaid program offers a lifeline for beneficiaries by reimbursing their mileage for medical travel. To keep things digital, the state uses a smartphone app that tracks a user’s location via GPS.
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Once a trip is logged, the money is loaded onto a debit card for the beneficiary to use. However, investigators say Evers found a digital backdoor.
While living in Farwell, Michigan, during the summer of 2023, Evers allegedly used a secondary “spoofing” app to feed fake GPS coordinates to the Medicaid tracker. This effectively tricked the system into thinking her phone was moving across the state while she stayed put, generating payouts for “phantom” trips that never happened.
The red flags were first raised by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) Office of Inspector General, which then handed the evidence over to the Attorney General’s team.
“Improper billing diverts public resources from those in need and siphons off taxpayer funds,” Attorney General Nessel said in a statement. She emphasized that her office is cracking down on those who view these public programs as personal ATMs.
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The legal weight against Evers is significant. She is charged with one count of Medicaid Fraud – Conspiracy, which carries a 10-year maximum sentence, along with ten separate counts of Medicaid Fraud – False Claim. Each of those individual counts is a four-year felony.
Judge Lisa Babcock set Evers’ bond at $10,000. For now, the Bradenton resident is scheduled to return to court on May 22 for a probable cause conference. The case is being spearheaded by the Health Care Fraud Division, a specialized unit funded largely by federal grants to protect the integrity of Michigan’s $7.3 million healthcare fraud budget.
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