Herbert “Herb” Kimble, the Chicago call-center operator whom federal prosecutors describe as a central architect of one of the largest Medicare fraud schemes on record, will spend 20 years in federal prison. That sentence comes nearly two years after he skipped his original sentencing and fled to the Philippines. According to an October 26, 2026 announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, a federal judge sentenced 60 year old Kimble to 240 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. There is no parole in the federal system. The court also ordered him to pay more than $199 million in restitution to Medicare and to forfeit more than $195 million in money and property.
According to the Justice Department, Kimble ran offshore call centers that used deceptive advertising to recruit Medicare beneficiaries, many of them elderly, and persuade them they needed orthotic back, shoulder, wrist and knee braces. Telemedicine companies then supplied signed doctors’ orders, often for braces that had been chosen in advance. Prosecutors say the doctors and other practitioners rarely conducted a real consultation. Kimble’s operation sold the beneficiaries’ information and the signed orders to durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, which shipped the braces and billed Medicare. The suppliers paid kickbacks dressed up as ordinary business payments. The HHS Office of Inspector General’s fugitive profile adds detail: from about 2014 to April 2019, callers responding to TV and internet ads for pain braces were screened, talked into a brace and often upsold on more. The invoices the call center sent to DME companies were written to hide the fact that they were buying prescriptions.
The sentencing announcement says the scheme billed Medicare more than $365 million in fraudulent claims, of which Medicare paid more than $199 million. Prosecutors say Kimble personally pocketed more than $195 million and used part of it to buy a luxury condominium at the Shangri-La hotel in the Philippines. Larger figures appear elsewhere because they measure different things. HHS-OIG says the DME companies that bought prescriptions from Kimble’s call center caused more than $1.2 billion in Medicare charges, the same headline figure attached to the broader 2019 investigation.
Kimble’s case grew out of Operation Brace Yourself, an April 2019 Justice Department crackdown that charged 24 defendants. They included executives of five telemedicine companies, owners of DME companies and three licensed medical professionals, in a scheme the department tied to more than $1.2 billion in losses. At the same time, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services took administrative action against 130 DME companies that had billed Medicare more than $1.7 billion. KFF Health News later reported how the schemes looked from the beneficiary’s side. One elderly man was billed for 10 braces from four suppliers, prescribed by four practitioners he had never spoken to.
Kimble pleaded guilty in 2019 to conspiracy against the United States under 18 U.S.C. § 371. The conspiracy’s objects included health care fraud and violations of the federal Anti-Kickback Statute. He then spent years cooperating against co-conspirators, according to HHS-OIG.
That cooperation ended in the fall of 2024, when Kimble failed to appear at three scheduled court proceedings, including two sentencing hearings, and a bench warrant was issued. He resurfaced on June 4, 2026, as one of eight fugitives on the FBI’s newly launched Most Wanted Fraudsters list. Within days he was in custody. The Philippine Bureau of Immigration said its Fugitive Search Unit arrested him in Pasig City, part of Metro Manila, and deported him, permanently barring him from re-entering the country (Daily Tribune). He was then indicted on three counts of failure to appear under 18 U.S.C. § 3146. That case was folded into the Justice Department’s 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown, which charged 455 defendants in connection with more than $6.5 billion in alleged fraud.
On August 11, 2026, Kimble entered a new plea agreement covering both the 2019 conspiracy and the failure-to-appear counts. Under the deal, according to IRS Criminal Investigation, both sides agreed the court should impose 15 to 20 years, and Kimble agreed to pay nearly $200 million in restitution, including $9 million at sentencing. Judge Anderson imposed the top of that range.
U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling called the case one of the largest international health care fraud schemes in the nation’s history. Colin M. McDonald, who leads the Justice Department’s new National Fraud Enforcement Division, said “fleeing overseas won’t spare healthcare fraudsters” from prosecution. HHS-OIG Special Agent in Charge Kelly Blackmon said Kimble exploited Medicare beneficiaries to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in false claims. Officials from the FBI’s Columbia field office and IRS-CI’s Charlotte field office also commented. The administration has presented the case as an early success for the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, chaired by Vice President JD Vance, and for the FBI’s fraudster list. The case was investigated by the FBI, HHS-OIG and IRS-CI and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Samantha Usher.
The Kimble prosecution involved only Medicare claims, and the announcement names no other payers. But the business model behind it has turned up repeatedly in later federal enforcement waves: harvest patient leads at scale, buy telemedicine prescriptions without real exams, and route the orders to suppliers willing to pay per referral. Those waves have reached genetic testing, topical pain creams and other DME. For workers’ compensation carriers, self-insured employers and group health plans, the pattern is a familiar set of red flags. They include out-of-area prescribers who never examined the patient, clusters of identical brace or device orders, suppliers with no local footprint, and patients who say they never asked for the equipment.