An Irish student has warned her fellow J1 travelers (those on summer working visas) to beware of a rental scam in the US that cost her and her friends almost $5,000. Leah Hughes (21), from Clonskeagh in Dublin, had been planning the trip of a lifetime - a summer in Los Angeles with four of her friends. The group wired $4,750 to a man claiming to own a property in Santa Monica on a reputable rental website, but he pocketed the money and left them with nothing. Leah, a journalism student from Dublin Business School, said: "Half of our accommodation money is gone. We've lost 750 euro each, which is half of what we were able to spend so we've decided we don't want to go to LA. I don't want to even think that I'm living in the same area as this guy who did this. “But we still want to go because we've paid for our flights and for our J1 visa but we're going to go to San Francisco instead. We don't have a house yet to stay in because we haven't been able to find anywhere that we can afford." Unfortunately, this kind of scam which cost Leah and her friends is common in the US. Celine Kennelly of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Center in San Francisco said, "Our advice is, if someone asks you to wire money ahead of arriving here, don't do it. We've had this situation before and many students get scammed this way every year. We want to get the message out there to people that wiring money over to someone you don't know just isn't safe." Instead, students are urged to find a cheap hostel for the first few nights in their city of choice and use that as a base to look for accommodation when they arrive.
Bethany Rawlins on 03 Oct 12"A Los Angeles man was sentenced to six years in prison last week for his role in a power wheelchair scam, topping what prosecutors say has been a series of Medicare fraud cases. David James Garrison, 50, a former physician assistant, was found guilty by a federal jury for his role in submitting $18.9 million in fraudulent Medicare claims for power wheelchairs and other equipment. The wheelchair case is the third time Garrison has been accused of Medicare fraud. In 2009, Garrison pleaded no contest to tax evasion for his role in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent medical clinic. He pleaded not guilty in October to charges that he forged prescriptions as part of an OxyContin ring that sold 1 million pills on the streets. That case is ongoing. Garrison's attorney did not return a call for comment about the cases. Garrison's physician assistant license lapsed in 2009, said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees many state licensing boards. He said the board examined the tax evasion case and did not see it as grounds for discipline. According to court documents, Garrison's cases involved the use of "cappers" or "marketers" who recruited Medicare beneficiaries to submit to unneeded care or hand over their personal information. That information was used to bill the program for medications, services or supplies that the patients didn't need. In the wheelchair case, prosecuted by the Los Angeles U.S. attorney's office, one witness testified that marketers had to recruit beneficiaries as far as 300 miles from Los Angeles because so many local people had already been used in other fraud schemes. In the first health fraud case linked to Garrison, he was described as an "at large" suspect in October 2007 when then-Attorney General Jerry Brown announced arrests in a $1.5 million health fraud scam. "The suspects create a fake healthcare clinic to line their own pockets rather than help the sick and elderly," a 20
