A Michigan doctor who misdiagnosed patients with cancer and then bombarded them with unnecessary treatments will have to face his victims – who lost their health, savings and trust – at an emotional sentencing hearing that opened Monday.

Disabled auto worker Robert Sobieray is among those who plan to be in the Detroit courtroom when Dr. Farid Fata learns his fate for using patients as cash cows, telling some of them they were deathly ill with diseases they didn’t actually have. In 2010, Fata diagnosed Sobieray with a rare blood cancer and subjected him to monthly infusions of chemotherapy and three weeks of radiation – expensive treatments that he said made his teeth fall out and his body twitch uncontrollably.

After Fata was arrested in 2013 and charged in what a prosecutor said was the “most egregious” case of health-care fraud in U.S. history, Sobieray went to a different oncologist and learned that he’d never even had cancer.

Federal prosecutors are seeking a 175-year sentence for Fata, who pleaded guilty to fraud in September, admitting he raked in millions from insurance companies for needless treatments at seven clinics in eastern Michigan. Fata, who lived in a sprawling mansion in ritzy Oakland Township and ran seven upscale clinics across eastern Michigan, declined to comment through his attorneys. The sentencing memorandum drafted by his lawyers is under seal.

The breadth of Fata’s misdeeds was laid bare last month in a sentencing memo from prosecutors, who revealed for the first time that a total of 553 people allegedly got unnecessary treatment – amounting to 9,000 injections or infusions that cost insurance companies and patients millions.

While Fata told healthy patients they were sick, he sold false hope to the terminally ill in an effort to convince them to keep buying treatments that would not extend their lives, authorities charged. “Some of these terminal patients never knew they were dying because of Fata’s lies,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. The government says that Fata didn’t just lie to his patients – he bullied them to keep them from finding out the truth.

In requesting a 175-year sentence, prosecutors compared Fata to Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years even though he was in his 70s. “In many ways, he is worse than Madoff, in that he wreaked damage on not only his victims’ bank accounts, but their bodies,” they wrote.