Fake health worker sold phony COVID test results, feds say. She misspelled ‘positive’

A New York City woman engaged in a fraud scheme that exploited resources and endangered the lives of city residents during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal prosecutors said.

Brooklyn resident Tatiana Daniel, 28, sold fake COVID-19 test results and hotel stays intended for sick patients during the first two years of the pandemic, according to a Nov. 22 news release from the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

An attorney for Daniel could not immediately be reached for comment by McClatchy News.

Daniel’s scheme began in March 2020, the month the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, according to prosecutors.

First, she posed as a respiratory therapist, allowing her to obtain a free hotel room through the city’s isolation program, which partnered with hotels to provide free lodging for sick patients and health care workers, the news release stated.

Then she and an individual working at the program sold at least 144 night’s worth of hotel rooms to customers on Facebook who were not eligible for no-cost lodging, prosecutors said.

At one point, seemingly in an effort to avoid detection, Daniel wrote to the other individual, saying “We gotta relocate that b**** they keep asking for employee ID.”

In addition to the hustle at the hotel, Daniel also peddled phony COVID-19 test results during the summer of 2021, according to officials. Both positive and negative results were forged, though Daniel misspelled positive as “postive.”

Daniel’s fake test results “likely put members of the public at risk of contracting the deadly virus,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams stated in the release.

More than 40,000 New York City residents died of COVID-19, according to The City, a nonprofit digital news site.

Further, Daniel fraudulently obtained nearly $100,000 in unemployment benefits, attempted to file for unemployment benefits in other states and acquired thousands of dollars in pandemic loans, according to prosecutors.

She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud on Nov. 22 and faces up to 5 years in prison. She also agreed to turn over $109,655 and pay $401,206 in restitution, according to the news release.

She is scheduled to be sentenced in March 2023.

Countless others across the country have deceitfully obtained hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money set aside for pandemic relief. Prosecutors have called it the “largest fraud in U.S. history,” according to NBC News.

This story was originally published November 22, 2022 at 12:22 PM with the headline "Fake health worker sold phony COVID test results, feds say. She misspelled ‘positive’."