A 49-year-old man who runs a marketing company partially used the coronavirus pandemic to try to defraud Medicare out of $1.1 million, authorities said.

Erik Santos, of Braselton, Georgia, faces up to 15 years in federal prison after being charged with one count of conspiring to violate the anti-kickback statute and one count of conspiring to commit health care fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey said in a statement.

Santos was scheduled to appear in federal court in Atlanta on Monday.

“While there are people going through what they are going through, you can either go bankrupt or you can prosper," Santos said in a phone call with an associate, prosecutors said.

Santos was already running a scheme with others in which he steered people with Medicare to diagnostic testing facilities for genetic cancer screening tests in exchange for kickbacks, authorities said.

Authorities noted the genetic cancer screenings were often not medically necessary.

Then when cases of coronavirus began to crop up across the country in February, Santos schemed to receive payments on a per-test basis for COVID-19 tests, provided that those tests were bundled with a much more expensive respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) test, according to prosecutors. The RPP test doesn’t identify or treat coronavirus.

Cornavirus tests, meanwhile, have been difficult for many Americans to obtain, authorities noted.

“Everybody has been chasing the Covid dollar bird,” Santos said on the same phone call, prosecutor allege.

Special Agent-in-Charge Gregory W. Ehrie of the FBI’s Newark office said Santos’ “profiteering is akin to receiving blood money.”

“It is unfortunate that we have people in our country who will capitalize on others’ suffering to make a buck,” Ehrie said in a statement. “But this case takes things to a new low. This defendant not only allegedly defrauded the government, he conspired to bilk his fellow citizens of a valuable resource that’s in high demand."

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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