Gainesville DME Owner Convicted in $8.6M Medicare Brace Scheme Fed by Telemarketing Calls

On October 27, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a federal jury in the Middle District of Florida convicted Sophie Dufort, 57, of Gainesville, Florida. Dufort owned a durable medical equipment (DME) company and managed several others. According to the DOJ, the scheme caused more than $8.6 million in fraudulent claims to be submitted to Medicare.

And what drove the whole scheme? Telemarketing calls.

How the scheme worked

According to court documents and trial evidence described in the DOJ press release, Dufort conspired with Paula Pirone, 70, of Ocala, Florida, and others to bill Medicare using fake doctors' prescriptions for orthotic braces.

Here's the chain, step by step:

• Purported marketing companies made "high pressure and manipulative telemarketing calls" to get Medicare beneficiaries' information.
• Those marketing companies paid medical practitioners to sign brace prescriptions without contacting or evaluating the patients. Or they stole doctors' credentials and forged the prescriptions.
• The marketing companies sold those prescriptions to DME companies run by Dufort and her co-conspirators.
• The DME companies shipped braces to beneficiaries and billed Medicare for millions.

The beneficiaries didn't want or need the braces. No doctor had examined them.

"Some of the calls from overseas would be faked"

Read that again.

According to the DOJ, when people complained that the voice on purported call recordings didn't match the beneficiary's voice, one co-conspirator explained that "some of the calls from overseas would be faked" and used to justify a bogus prescription.

So the recordings that were supposed to prove a real conversation with a real patient? Some of them were fake. That's not a compliance gap. That's fabricated evidence propping up a fraud.

The situation got even worse. A medical expert testified that using these combinations of braces could be "very dangerous" for the elderly Medicare population. And when people complained and wanted to send the braces back, the DOJ says they were told to "just get rid of them or . . . just pass them down," so the companies wouldn't have to pay Medicare back.

That's just shitty behavior. Am I right?

The verdict and what's next

Dufort was convicted of:

• Conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud (maximum 20 years)
• Two counts of health care fraud (maximum 10 years each)
• Conspiracy to defraud the United States and to offer and pay illegal kickbacks (maximum 5 years)
• One count of offering and paying illegal kickbacks (maximum 10 years)

Sentencing is scheduled for January 2027. A federal district judge will decide the sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. The release does not describe the status of any case against Pirone or the other co-conspirators, and anyone not convicted is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court.

The Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated. Trial Attorney Jody King of the Fraud Division's Health Care Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hamilton are prosecuting.

Why this matters if you buy or sell leads

Look, I've spent my career around call centers and lead generation. I'm passionate about this industry. That's exactly why cases like this really annoy me.

Here's the thing ... the people convicted in this case weren't the ones dialing. They were buying what the dialing produced. Prescriptions, patient information, "proof" of a call. And that didn't protect anyone.

If you buy leads, transfers, or anything that came out of a phone call, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do you actually know how your vendor gets consumer information?
2. Have you listened to the calls yourself, not just a sample the vendor picked?
3. Would you notice if the voice on a recording didn't match the person it claims to be?
4. What happens when a consumer complains? Does anyone investigate, or does the complaint just disappear?

High pressure scripts aimed at seniors are a red flag. Recordings that don't match the consumer are a five-alarm fire. Complaints are valuable data, not noise.

The takeaway

This case is a Medicare fraud case, not a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) case. But it's built on the same thing the TCPA is about: calls that people never wanted, used to take advantage of them. Know your vendors. Listen to your calls. Take care of the people on the other end of the line.

Source: Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, Gainesville Woman Convicted in $8.6M Medicare Fraud Scheme (Oct. 27, 2026). The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida issued a matching release.