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The Justice Department has charged more than 450 people in a health care fraud takedown involving over $6.5 billion in false claims.

Getting into it: Officials unveiled charges against 455 defendants on Tuesday, including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals, for schemes spanning opioid distribution, hospice, adult day care and wound care, calling it the second-largest health care fraud action ever charged. The cases were filed across 56 federal districts and 45 states.

A major focus was fraudulent skin-substitute allografts, after the department’s data team flagged that Medicare claims for the service had exploded from $200 million in 2019 to $14.4 billion in 2025. In one case, an Arizona executive allegedly relabeled tissue at a 2,000% markup and paid kickbacks to target hospice patients, pocketing over $24 million he spent on mansions, luxury cars and a Maserati. A Texas nurse practitioner was charged in a $906 million scheme, accused of billing Medicare upward of $1 million for the average patient.

The DOJ said it seized more than $182 million in cash, along with vehicles, jewelry and other assets, while FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said one nurse practitioner had used vulnerable hospice and nursing-home patients “as living piggy banks.”

Officials cast the operation as a new era of fraud-fighting powered by data analytics and cross-agency cooperation. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said the agency was “done playing catch-up,” deploying analytics to freeze suspicious payments before money goes out, while acting Attorney General Todd Blanche warned, “if you seek to harm or cheat Americans, we will find you, seize any assets and prosecute you.”

This all comes as the takedown falls under Trump’s March executive order creating a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud chaired by Vice President JD Vance. International cooperation also netted defendants tied to multibillion-dollar schemes overseas, including arrests in Estonia, Cyprus and the Philippines.