{"id":6146,"date":"2026-10-20T16:43:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T21:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/2026\/10\/20\/illinois-lab-owner-charged-in-66m-covid-fraud\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T16:43:58","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T21:43:58","slug":"illinois-lab-owner-charged-in-66m-covid-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/2026\/10\/20\/illinois-lab-owner-charged-in-66m-covid-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Illinois Lab Owner Charged in $66M COVID Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> CHICAGO, IL \u2013 October 20, 2026 (STL.News) Federal prosecutors have charged an Illinois laboratory executive with orchestrating an alleged $66.2 million COVID-19 testing fraud scheme involving hundreds of thousands of laboratory tests that investigators say were never performed. Rajesh \u201cRaj\u201d Patel, 52, of Schaumburg, Illinois, was charged with five counts of wire fraud after a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Illinois returned an indictment on Monday, October 19. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Patel allegedly generated fraudulent negative COVID-19 test results for at least 380,000 tests and used those records to obtain millions of<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stl.news\/illinois-lab-owner-charged-in-66m-covid-fraud\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Read Original Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CHICAGO, IL \u2013 October 20, 2026 (STL.News) Federal prosecutors have charged an Illinois laboratory executive with orchestrating an alleged $66.2 million COVID-19 testing fraud scheme involving hundreds of thousands of laboratory tests that investigators say were never performed. Rajesh \u201cRaj\u201d&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6147,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6148,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6146\/revisions\/6148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/directsourcenews.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}