Two men from North Texas have been indicted on fraud charges stemming from an alleged student-athlete billing scheme and a COVID-19 program scheme that netted tens of millions of dollars.
Mouzon Bass III, 58, of Highland Park, and Lance West Wilson, 54, of Allen, along with Robert Brent Scott, 59, of La Quinta, California, were handed indictments from a federal grand jury in January and charged with conspiring to commit wire fraud, conspiring to commit healthcare fraud, and conspiring to commit money laundering.
A fourth alleged co-conspirator, Kyle Kelly Carter of Keller, 61, was indicted in October 2023 and charged with conspiring to commit wire fraud.
Bass and Wilson are accused of siphoning millions from private insurance carriers by filing false medical claims through their company, Vivature.
Federal investigators discovered that between 2014 and 2023, Vivature allegedly billed private insurance carriers thousands of times for student-athlete medical visits with Scott and Carter, who were both physicians, that never actually took place. According to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas, these student-athletes were located across the country and were never under their care.
Bass, Wilson, and Scott also face charges of conspiring to commit healthcare fraud and conspiring to commit money laundering in a separate scheme.
Allegedly taking advantage of the COVID-19-era federal taxpayer dollars earmarked for testing insured Americans abroad, Bass, Wilson, and Scott purportedly submitted thousands of false claims to the Health Resources and Services Administration. Yet the American travelers they allegedly claimed to have tested for COVID-19 were either already insured or ineligible for the program.
Both scams allegedly yielded over $70 million, which the perpetrators used to purchase luxury residences, a yacht, and more.
White-collar crime, however, is not limited to such large-scale, multimillion-dollar schemes. The Dallas Police Department logged 166 fraud reports this January alone, while 2,460 reports were made last year, according to the City’s crime analytics dashboard. Most of these reports involved swindles and false pretense schemes, such as an individual knowingly selling counterfeit luxury branded purses.
Such crimes have taxed the limited resources of DPD, which currently only has around 3,000 officers on staff despite a City analysis recommending roughly 4,000. City leaders have also only budgeted DPD just $654 million this fiscal year, which is significantly less than the spending levels seen for police operations in other high-crime municipalities, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Downtown Dallas has borne the brunt of the officer shortage, with crime being about seven times more likely to occur there than in Fort Worth’s city center, according to monthly studies conducted by the Metroplex Civic & Business Association. The City of Fort Worth tasks a specialized neighborhood police unit that collaborates with private security guards to patrol the downtown area.