Eight Charged in $38 Million Brooklyn Medicaid Fraud Tied to Adult Daycare Centers, Including Prominent Community Board Member

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against eight defendants accused of running a coordinated Medicaid kickback scheme through two Social Adult Day Care centers: APNA Adult Daycare and Ashiana Social Adult Daycare, both in Brooklyn, according to the New York Post.

The alleged scheme ran from 2019 through December 2025. Recruiters were paid kickbacks to sign seniors up for the facilities. Medicaid recipients who enrolled were paid cash bribes, even though most never actually attended. The operators then billed New York Medicaid for services they never delivered, submitting a total of $38 million in fraudulent claims, according to the indictment.

To disguise what they were doing, prosecutors allege the defendants created fake sign-in sheets listing attendance numbers that exceeded the building's own certificate of occupancy on certain days. They used billing staff based in Pakistan and laundered proceeds through shell companies, with checks recorded as "gifts," "dividends," or coded terms including "medicine" and "laddu," a word for an Indian sweet, per the indictment. After a December 2025 federal search warrant was executed, prosecutors allege Bibi, Siddiqui, and Ali tried to cover their tracks by telling staff to get new phones and delete data.

The indictment also alleges that payments were made to enrollees even when they were not in the United States — with some reportedly living abroad while they or their family members collected Medicaid kickback money.

Pervez Siddiqui, 78, is the most prominent name on the indictment. He is a member of Brooklyn Community Board 13 and the owner of approximately 15 pharmacies in New Jersey, according to the New York Post. He was arrested Monday.

Co-defendants include Shazia Bibi (also known as Shazia Wattoo), Abdul Aziz, Shair Ali, and four alleged recruiters: Zebun Ahmed, Josna Begum, Saira Khatoon, and Atia Shahnaz.

A source with knowledge of the investigation described the recruitment to the New York Post: "Marketers are going around looking for the Medicaid card. They stop people on the street, at bus stops. They go into doctor's offices. They go into NYCHA [government housing] where they know people are low income. They ask, 'do you have a Medicaid card?'" According to the source, each marketer manages a group of 30 to 50 patients and there is a cultural element to the targeting: "A Russian marketer will pick up Russians, Pakistani for Pakistanis, Chinese for Chinese." The source also said seniors at APNA or their family members were receiving $500 a month in kickbacks for daycare services that were never provided.

Political Connections: What's Documented and What Isn't

The New York Post, the sole source on this story, frames Siddiqui's political donations and access as central context. The documented facts: Siddiqui was a regular donor to Democratic campaigns, sometimes contributing more than $10,000 to individual candidates, per campaign finance records. Through his affiliation with a group called the American Pakistani Public Affairs Committee (APPAC), Siddiqui hosted a fundraiser for New York Attorney General Letitia James in June 2022 at a restaurant in Coney Island. In December 2025, photos obtained by the Post show him at a meeting with then-mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, held immediately after Mamdani's election victory. Mamdani had previously praised the APPAC for its get-out-the-vote efforts and credited their support for his win.

Siddiqui is also Board Chair of a separate nonprofit, APNA Community Services — which is explicitly not part of the federal indictment, according to the Post. The December meeting where Siddiqui was present was connected to APPAC, not to the indicted daycare operations.

The Post also published photos of co-defendant Shazia Bibi at a Gracie Mansion dinner with former Mayor Eric Adams.

The Post's framing connects these social and political ties to the alleged fraud through proximity. That framing deserves scrutiny. Elected officials routinely attend community events and accept donations from people who later face criminal charges. Presence at the same dinner or posing for a photo is not evidence of knowledge of fraud. The Post does not allege or establish that any politician knew about or facilitated the scheme.

The fair concern on the other side: community board seats, political access, and institutional credibility can be used to build the appearance of legitimacy that makes fraud harder to detect. If Siddiqui's civic profile helped the scheme run for six years, from 2019 to December 2025, that is a legitimate oversight question worth examining, independent of partisan framing.

What Is and Isn't Proven

The charges in the indictment are allegations. Siddiqui and his co-defendants have not been convicted. The indictment lays out a detailed scheme, including specific concealment methods, but the evidence will be tested in court.

The $38 million figure represents the amount allegedly billed to Medicaid fraudulently, per the indictment. It is not yet an adjudicated loss.

The Broader Pattern

New York's Social Adult Day Care program has been under sustained scrutiny. According to the Post, Medicaid reimbursements to insurance companies — called Managed Long Term Care providers — cap at $6,000 a month per patient in most cases, and daycare scams of this kind often extend into transportation companies, pharmacies, and home healthcare services that use the same Medicaid numbers for payments and kickbacks. The scale and duration of this alleged scheme raises a concrete question for state and federal oversight: how many similar operations are still running?