A Felon Scams Her Way to Millions$$

A home care agency in Cincinnati looked legitimate on paper — steady Medicare and Medicaid payments, and a growing staff. Behind the scenes, the owner, Sharon Romain Ward, was stacking false claims, billing while patients were in the hospital, and hiding a prior felony that should have barred her from running a healthcare business.  More than 92,000 claims moved through the system, and Sharon bilked the system of more than $8 million dollars.

We're introducing our “greed scale” to gauge the level of "greediness" this Greedy Mofo deserves. How would you rate her "Greedu Mofoness on a scale of 1 - 10?

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Greedy Mofos Catch your coins by the world burn slow Greedy Mofos and show Greedy Mofos Every promise that you make we know Greedy Mo Foes

Welcome And Super Bowl Warm‑Up

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Greedy Mofo.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello Greedy Mofo fans, how are you this evening? And Aston, how are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hello, Pippa. I am doing just fine. Good, good. What are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Fantastic, fantastic. Did you watch the Super Bowl last night?

SPEAKER_01 0:36

I did. And the team I was rooting for, not that I really had any vested interest in either one, but I was pulling for Seattle.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

I was pulling for the West Coast team over the East Coast team, so I was happy too.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yay.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

And it was fairly competitive. It wasn't a boring game. It was really, really well played. So um it was enjoyable.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Yeah, it was pretty good. I kind of wanted more of a high-scoring game, but it was pretty good. Yeah.

Introducing The Case: Cincinnati Fraud

SPEAKER_01 1:09

And I know that there's so much going on these days, but let's go ahead and get to because I want to know who's the greediest mofo this week.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Okay, well, I have taken a break from Bruce M. I just have plain old, plain old financial fraud this week. I figured our listeners could maybe use a break from blood and gore, but there is a murder-adjacent component to this story. So let me just jump right in and give you the basics of this um crime. So it comes to us from my beloved Cincinnati, Ohio. Um it is health care fraud.

How The Billing Scam Worked

SPEAKER_00 2:00

So we have a greedy mofo by the name of Sharon Romain Ward, who owned Halo Home Healthcare and um several crimes uh that she was convicted and indicted for. Um she overbilled for federal health care programs. She billed for services that were not performed. Um, she continued to charge for home health care while patients were in the hospital. So they obviously weren't at home. Um and in 2017 through 2020, she hired over 50 employees with significant criminal histories. One was convicted of a quadruple murder. So she had a duty to protect these people that her employees were going into their homes, and she hired someone with a quadruple murder conviction. I haven't been able to find the um the name of that person. Um, so I kind of want to see if I can find it, but I could not find any details on that quadruple murder. Okay.

Hiring With Violent Records

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Question.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

I know there's a lot of financial crimes out there. I know there's a lot of scams that goes on with the medical and health industry. And you said that she had her own business and she was running a home health service. Correct. Was she a non-profit or was it a corporation, self just self-employed? Was she getting any grants from the government?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

This was for-profit, no grants. She was billing for like Medicare and Medicaid. So I've got a few uh I've got some stats here um on her crime. So from the years 2016 to 2021, 92,770 claims. She sought 8,556,776.58 from those claims. She received a little bit less than that, about 153,000 less than that, 8,403,299.24 to be exact.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

And this is over and this is over how many years?

SPEAKER_00 4:51

From twenty sixteen to twenty twenty-one. So about five sixteen, seven, eight, six years. Five, six years. So probably six tax years.

Following The Money: Claims And Payouts

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Okay. So basically, and what's her name again?

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Uh Sharon Romain Ward, W-A-R-D.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

So basically, Sharon was running this scam where she was allegedly, and I'm sure at some capacity, taking care of old people in their own homes, correct?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

She would send people to their homes, and I have some experience with this, you know. I know, I know sending people to their homes to take care of them. It's not like she had various houses, and the old people would come and stay in those houses.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Correct. This was in their homes. Okay. Okay. And wait, wait, wait. This is not alleged. She was convicted and she is serving time. So we do not have to use the word alleged on this one.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Oh, well, she got caught then breeding mostly. I love it. So I'm glad that she got caught. I'm just surprised it took them so long to catch her.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Okay, so so here's the

Sentence, Restitution, And Tax Charges

SPEAKER_00 6:08

deal. It's gonna make you so mad what she's serving. So she is only serving. Well, her conviction was in 2024, so it took a few years to get the conviction and for them to build their case. Four years in prison. Wait, that's it. Four years. So she has to pay restitution to the Ohio Department of Medicaid, one million nine hundred fifty-five thousand six hundred and sixty-eight dollars to the veterans, uh, let's see, veterans affairs, health care, um, that faction of the government, eighty-one thousand six hundred and seventeen dollars to the IRS. Um, she also pleaded guilty in 2024 to false income tax returns. And there's a little more to this story. She opened this company in 2015. So she immediately for tax year 2016 through 21

Prior Felony And Eligibility Gaps

SPEAKER_00 7:21

was, you know, filing false claims and false tax returns. So this was pretty immediate. Um, but in 2013, she had a prior felony conviction. She had passed forged and fraudulent prescriptions for oxycodone and hydrocodone. She was a nurse practitioner in Warren County, which is right outside Cincinnati. Um, yeah. So she was already a felon, but she concealed her ownership of that prior company where she was the nurse practitioner, which would have voided her eligibility to own a home health care company. So there's so many flaws in the system that allowed her to get away with this.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Wow. So basically, yes, she's a greedy mofo. I mean, she's I mean, anybody that takes advantage of anything to do with healthcare in my mind. And considering that people actually paid her, you know, because I'm sure not all that money that was taking care of these people were coming, was coming from Medicare or Medicaid, or the government, I'm sure families were paying some of it as well. And so it's it's sort of it's sort of like I I I it's sort of like she's a greedy mofo, but for her to go out and employ people with suspicious and terrible backgrounds, is there anything that talks about the way that her patients were being treated? Is there anything negative on that front?

SPEAKER_00 9:07

I have not found anything to that degree, which you know that is a silver lining in this case because you know, it seems like this was just for financial

Were Patients Harmed

SPEAKER_00 9:18

gain for her, not um, you know, a criminal aspect to hurt people. This was more to take advantage of the government and the Medicare and the Medicaid schemes that that she had had going.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

So um Okay, so there was not any complaints of elder abuse or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Not that I was able to find in this case.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Okay, that's good because I was really gonna rag on her then. I was gonna call it every name under the sun if I heard about something like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Right, right. But you know, the people she employed who knows because so many crimes are underreported or not reported. So these these convicted felons that are going into people's homes probably unsupervised.

Systemic Oversight Failures

SPEAKER_00 10:09

And if these are, you know, people on Medicare or Medicaid, they may not know that they even have the option to report this type of abuse, you know. So, so who knows what was not reported, if if anything, it you know, there may never be a way of knowing. So, um but but yeah, and she was probably, you know, a lot of people who do get out of prison and have criminal histories, you know, they they may want to turn their life around and really work and really, you know, be a productive member of society. Um, but she's probably doing them no favors because she's probably underpaying them tremendously. So there's even more, you know, criminality in that, in my mind, you know, maybe not from a legal standpoint, but from a moral standpoint, you know, she can get away with even putting more money in her pocket by underpaying her employees because they are convicted felons. And to me, that that is just not right.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

No, it's not right, it really isn't. Um, so she's serving time in jail, but not a lot of time in jail.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

No, she was sentenced in 24. She was sentenced, so she'll be out in 2028.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Okay. So even though she has to pay restitution, it's not the entire amount. And so it looks like even though she's a greedy muffo, it looks like she just basically outsmarted the system because I'm like, if I catch you doing this and you scammed me out of eight million dollars over the course of five years or so, yes, you're either gonna go to jail for longer than four, or you're gonna pay back all of it.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Yeah. Now, some of the claims may not have been the whole eight million. Some of those could been could have been valid. These are what she sought and what she received. So, you know, probably not every claim was fraudulent. She just overbilled and um billed for services that weren't, but some services were billed for. So so I just I I would like to see the percentage of that 8 million that was fraudulent. So that could just be the one point, almost 1.2 that are actually almost two, two million, it seems like. Um, that could have been the fraudulent part of it. So a lot of the claims could have been, you know, legitimate, legitimately billed.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Okay. Interesting. Interesting.

unknown 13:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

I do call consider that she was a definitely a greedy mufo. Pisses me off, you know, because I can understand why the government talks about people who scam and people who do this and this and this. And it's kind of like, well, yeah, because y'all kind of make it easy for people to scam y'all. It's not like y'all investigate everything.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

That is so true. There's underemployment, um, because they they don't have the time to validate every single claim that comes through. And you know, you can kind of go down that rabbit hole of government agencies, you know, just kind of case in point. This was a the out in California, the Turpin children, you know, they they uh the child protective uh services, they ended up going to foster home. Remember the 13 kids where their the mother they had the Yeah, there's something on yeah,

Parallels To Foster Care Fraud

SPEAKER_00 14:07

yeah, there's a show on Hulu about it. Yeah, so they went in the foster system after they were removed from their abusive situation, and it was almost just as bad as with their you know, their biological parents, and um the system failed them twice. So government agencies, it's how how do you how do you solve for that problem? How do how do we how do we fix the government? How do we make it to where we can trust what's happening, the children in the foster system? And I know that's not Medicare, Medicaid, different storyline, but still the oversight is not there for these types of cases.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

That's bad. And the foster people, they're getting paychecks from the government, you know, for being foster parents. So it's very similar. So they're fraudulently getting money from the government for being a foster parent and not taking care of the children. So it's somewhat similar in that it's fraudulent billing. So yeah, no murders this week, but no murders, interesting though. Something to be aware of, you know. If you have if you need, you know, um, if you have home health care for elderly parents or elderly family members, you know, maybe ask for background checks.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yep, yep, yep, yep. So as far as greedy mof, we need a scale. We need a scale for greedy mofos. Like on a scale of one to ten, based on what they've done and um what they've done and the severity of of the consequences and their greediness, we need to rate these on a scale, I think. Of course, the ones that involve murder and things like that will have a higher rating, you know. Um, so yeah, it's kind of like on a scale of one to ten, how many greedy thumbs down would you give Sharon?

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Well, okay. We're just gonna kind of pretend we have a scale right now. I'm

Practical Advice For Families

SPEAKER_00 16:32

gonna give her a three since she didn't hurt anyone that we know of.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

So I'm gonna give her if she hurt anyone.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

I'm sure we would have. I mean, we don't know if her employees did, but I don't think that was her intention based on this. So I'm I'm gonna stick with the three. Uh if 10 is the worst, I'm gonna say I'm gonna give her a three.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

You're giving her a three? I'm gonna give her a higher number because she scammed them out of almost eight million dollars.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Well, like we we don't know if all those were uh fraudulent. That could have been legitimate claims. So I'm sticking with my three.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Okay. All right. But she didn't she uh actually, okay, hang on. I'm gonna bump it up one because of her prior conviction in 2013 um as a nurse practitioner, giving um oxycodone and hydrocodone. So I'm gonna bump it up to four.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

You bumping it up to four?

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Yeah, because

Rating The Greed Scale

SPEAKER_00 17:39

of that factor. Okay. So she's a four, a four GM. Okay. A four greedy muffin. Four GM.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

I'm giving her a five. Okay. Fair enough. I'm giving a fair enough. I think they should have punished her more, gave her more than four years.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

I do agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

I don't know what each crime the sentence would be for each fraudulent individual crime. Um, but defrauding healthcare, Medicare, it's not, I'm not giving her a high score only because we don't know if the patients were harmed, and it was just all in accounting. Correct. Correct. So it's kind of like as long as she didn't harm any patients, she just took advantage of the system. She was greedy, she found loopholes, even though she hired criminals, even though she herself was a criminal. Um, I'm giving her a five. She's a five greedy motherfucker.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Okay, got it. Mm-hmm. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

Sounds good. That was that was that was interesting. I'm still kind of torn because, like I said, I had some experience with home health care, and you hear all kinds of stories about nurses, but most of it, the worst cases are the elder abuse and taking advantage of the elderly and getting them to sign over their will and and that kind of, you know, those kind of stories. I've I've even know of some instances. I mean, personally, people that took advantage of someone and and they got caught and they didn't get nearly the kind of punishment that they deserved. Which is typical. Yeah, sometimes our justice system fails us too.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

That is true, but at least she is serving, so you know, let it be a warning to those who who own these type of companies. Don't scam the government, you'll serve something.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

All right then. Well, thank you for that interesting caper. So next time it'll be my turn to find a greedy motherfucker.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Alrighty, I can't wait. I cannot wait to hear that.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Can't wait. All right. This one was short and sweet. So, anything else you want to add before we close it out today?

SPEAKER_00 20:11

No, just don't

Justice, Loopholes, And Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 20:12

be a greedy mofo. And email us info at oeneoene21.com.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

And follow us on our 1121 Facebook page as well. And also on our Instagram. Until next time, people out there with the greedy mouth. Don't get any scam.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Stay clean, people.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Stay clean, stay aware.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

Okay, yes. Mostly stay aware. Alrighty. Well we're talking by everyone.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

I accept the mouth. Every promise that you make green no Green Moffos. Greedy Moffos, anytime for the money, that's the only code.