Five convicted for reselling fertility treatments obtained with forged prescriptions on Wallapop

BarcelonaThey obtained more than 700 boxes of fertility treatments at no cost using over 500 forged prescriptions. They then sold the drugs below market price to women who couldn't afford them and sought alternatives on websites like Wallapop and Milanuncios. This public healthcare fraud, targeting women trying to become mothers, amounts to €226,000. Those implicated included a primary care center employee and a pharmacist from Sant Adrià de Besòs, the director of a fertility clinic in Palma, and two women from Seville, a mother and daughter. Although almost all of them tried to evade responsibility by presenting themselves as victims of the scam, all five have been convicted. sentenced to barely minimum terms a decade after the fraud with a sentence handed down a year after the trial.

Among the drugs being recalled were, for example, Menopur and Gonal-f, which are used in ovarian stimulation treatments in assisted reproduction procedures. A complete treatment is expensive: in one of the cases included in the Barcelona Provincial Court's ruling, the cost of the medication for a woman reached 1,450 euros. In fact, sometimes women who have already become pregnant come back at a lower price for the medication they no longer need to take. However, this case was not an example of the "altruistic market" that the investigators were already aware of.

It all started at the Doctor Barraquer Primary Care Center in Sant Adrià de Besòs. Jorge A. was one of the center's cleaning staff, and in January 2016 he began taking prescription pads—at that time they were still printed on paper—that were red and corresponded to pensioners receiving free medication. Until March of the following year, he also took the stamps of four urologists, prescription validation labels, and labels for 14 patients from the primary care center (CAP). He personally signed 564 prescriptions and wrote the names of the medications he wanted to obtain. For the second step, Jorge A. went to a pharmacy in Badalona, ​​a 12-minute drive from the CAP where he worked. The pharmacist, Susana C., gave him 772 boxes of medications for fertility treatments and ovarian stimulation, all of them 100% subsidized because they corresponded to red prescriptions, without asking for the patients' health insurance cards. From that moment on, the medications were no longer stored under the necessary conditions, and the cold chain was no longer maintained. This, coupled with the fact that they resold medications that no doctor had prescribed, has resulted in a conviction for all those involved for a crime against public health. In the case of the now-retired pharmacist, the sentence is two years and three months.

Shipments to Seville

Jorge A. received the harshest sentence, four years and four months, after confessing to his involvement in the fraud. He sold some of the medications directly to others or advertised them online, but primarily shipped them 1,000 kilometers away to Seville. The third person involved in the case, Inmaculada C., received 29 packages in Seville containing between one and seven kilos of medication sent by Jorge A., which she then resold. She also received nine shipments containing between 3 and 19 kilos of medicine directly from the pharmacy in Badalona. Inmaculada C.'s involvement went even further, as she also wrote the names of the medications on some of the forged prescriptions, and she was sentenced to two years and ten months. The fourth person involved, Concepción O., is Inmaculada C.'s mother. She helped her daughter collect some of the packages she received from Badalona and also delivered some to the buyers she found. She has been sentenced to one year in prison.

Inmaculada C. advertised the drugs on secondhand sales websites, such as Wallapop and Milanuncios, and also through WhatsApp groups where women shared information about fertility treatments. She made over a hundred shipments to buyers, many to the fifth person involved, Belén L. This fifth person involved in the scheme owned an assisted reproduction clinic in Palma and directed her clients to Inmaculada C. to obtain medications at half price. In exchange, Inmaculada C. gave her free medications for the donors at her clinic and recommended her to clients. Belén L. is not involved in the falsification of prescriptions, and her sentence is six months, solely for a crime against public health, for having facilitated the patients of her clinic taking medications without any guarantee of their safety. At the trial, he said he had tried to help some women when he saw they couldn't afford the medication, especially when they had to repeat the process if they didn't get pregnant.