According to officials in a release on Thursday (October 7), a total of eighteen former NBA players were charged for attempting to defraud the NBA’s Health and Welfare Benefit Plan out of nearly US$4 million.

Following reports on Thursday, 16 out of the 18 accused of fraud were taken into custody by authorities.

The defendants are each facing counts of conspiracy to commit health care and wire fraud.

A U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York told reporters. “They will have to answer for their flagrant violations of law.”

The defendants include:  

Ronald Glen “Big Baby” Davis, Terrence Williams, Shannon Brown, Alan Anderson, Anthony Allen, William Bynum, Christopher Douglas-Roberts, Melvin Ely, Jamario Moon, Darius Miles, Milton Palacio, Ruben Patterson, Eddie Robinson, Gregory Smith, Sebastian Telfair, Charles Watson Jr., Antoine Wright and Anthony Wroten.

It is not clear whether any of the defendants have lawyered up.

• Terrence Williams the “scheme’s linchpin”

34-year-old Terrence Williams, a Seattle native who played in the NBA for four seasons, was coined the “scheme’s linchpin,” who submitted false claims to the league’s health care plan.

According to authorities Williams received kickback pay-outs totalling US$230,000 after submitting falsified invoices.

Officials are alleging that the defendants ranked in US$2.5 million in pay-outs for the false claims totalling US$3.9 million. 

‘They were caught because they got sloppy’

Prosecutors are alleged that they caught on to the scheme after the sloppy actions of Gregory Smith.

Smith, who used to play for the Houston Rockets, allegedly submitted a claim for IV sedation, a root canal and crown that he received during a Dec. 20, 2018, dental procedure in Beverly Hills, California.

The problem is Smith was not even in the U.S., he was playing in Taiwan’s Super Basketball League at the time of the alleged procedure.

“Travel records, e-mail and publicly available box scores showed that he was playing professional basketball in Taiwan that week and did not receive root canals in Beverly Hills as represented in the claim form he submitted,” one prosecutor said.

Red flags immediately went up after the other defendants submitted claims for the same dental procedures on the same days.

On April 30, 2016, the trio Davis, Allen and Wroten filed for root canals, all supposedly performed on the same six teeth, and on May 11, 2016, they all put in for payments for crowns done on the same six teeth.

According to the indictment, there were small things that stood out for authorities on the false invoices and medical forms “they are not on letterhead, they contain unusual formatting, they have grammatical errors.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) comments

“This health care industry loses tens of millions of dollars a year to fraud,” said Michael Driscoll, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office.

Driscoll noted that such cases have damaging trickle-down impacts on consumers.

“These costs are then passed down to business and customers. That’s a fraud we take very seriously,” he added.

The NBA releases statement

“The benefit plans provided by the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association to our players are critically important to support their health and well-being throughout their playing careers and over the course of their lives, which makes these allegations particularly disheartening,” the league said in a statement.

Among the defendants are Shannon Brown who is the ex-husband to Grammy-winning singer Monica and popular former Boston Celtic player Ronald Glen “Big Baby” Davis.