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Gregory Schreck, 50, of Johnson County, admitted that he and his co-conspirators targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries to provide their personally identifiable information and agree to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces, pain creams, and other items through misleading mailers, television advertisements, and calls from offshore call centers. Schreck and his co-conspirators owned, controlled, and operated DMERx, an internet-based platform that generated false and fraudulent doctors’ orders for orthotic braces, pain creams, and other items for these beneficiaries. Schreck, a vice president of the company that operated DMERx, admitted that he offered to connect pharmacies, durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, and marketers with telemedicine companies that would accept illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for signed doctors’ orders that were transmitted using the DMERx platform. Schreck and his co-conspirators received payments for coordinating these illegal kickback transactions and referring the completed doctors’ orders to the DME suppliers, pharmacies, and telemarketers that paid for them. The fraudulent doctors’ orders generated by DMERx falsely represented that a doctor had examined and treated the Medicare beneficiaries when, in reality, purported telemedicine companies paid doctors to sign the orders without regard to medical necessity and based only on a brief telephone call with the beneficiary, or sometimes no interaction with the beneficiary at all. The DME suppliers and pharmacies that paid illegal kickbacks in exchange for these doctors’ orders generated through DMERx billed Medicare and other insurers more than $1 billion. Medicare and the insurers paid more than $360 million based on these false and fraudulent claims.