Roya Jafari-Hassad, MD, was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for prescribing oxycodone pills without a legitimate medical purpose and fraudulently billing insurance providers for procedures that were never performed, according to a March 2 news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
What happened?
- From approximately January 2019 through May 2022, Dr. Jafari-Hassad, who has offices in Great Neck, Forest Hills, Queens and Manhattan, charged patients hundreds of dollars in cash in exchange for monthly prescriptions of oxycodone with no legitimate medical purpose. At times, prescriptions were issued without appointments, with payment information obtained and prescriptions immediately refilled.
- Dr. Jafari-Hassad was convicted at trial in December 2024 of eight counts of prescribing oxycodone pills without a legitimate medical purpose. She pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud in April 2025. She also faces a $150,000 fine and ordered $152,765 in restitution.
- Prosecutors said she made an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the payments and submitted false claims to Medicare and private benefit programs for services that were not rendered.
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