FBI and GSA Target Foreign Nationals in Defense-Parts and Medicare Fraud Cases

The FBI added Turkish national Onur Simsek to its Most Wanted Fraudsters list this month and GSA Administrator Edward C. Forst tied the case to a wider effort to stop overseas actors from penetrating federal programs. Prosecutors say Simsek, believed to be in Turkey, used a Florida front company to win Defense Department contracts by posing as a vetted U.S. manufacturer while parts were made in Turkey from export-controlled drawings and then relabeled as domestic product. The components were destined for Navy Nimitz- and Ford-class carriers, Navy submarines, Marine Corps armored vehicles, and Army M1 Abrams and M-60 tanks. Investigators have described some items as “critical application” parts whose failure could leave systems inoperable. Military testing later found supplied parts did not meet specifications.

Court records say the scheme ran through Mason Engineering Parts LLC in the Middle District of Florida, operated by Yuksel Senbol. She pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering, and unlawful export of military technical data after helping Simsek and co-conspirator Mehmet Ozcan hide Simsek’s role. He had been debarred after a 2018 conviction in the Southern District of Florida for a similar contracting fraud. Senbol stripped Turkish markings, shipped the parts onward, and wired proceeds back to Turkey. The FBI posted a $150,000 reward for Simsek. Forst said the alleged fraud “deprived taxpayers of value, denied honest businesses fair opportunity, and diverted critical resources from American warfighters,” and that GSA would keep working with Vice President JD Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. GSA separately announced more than $13 billion in suspected contractor fraud identified since March using governmentwide data; that figure is an administrative estimate, not a court judgment.

On the health-care side, the bureau in July arrested Khalid Ahmed Satary, 54, in the Middle East and returned him to the United States. He had been on the same Most Wanted Fraudsters list. A 2019 indictment in the Eastern District of Louisiana alleges that from 2016 to 2019 he owned laboratories in Georgia, Oklahoma, and Louisiana that billed Medicare more than $547 million for medically unnecessary genetic cancer tests, using call centers, recruiters, telemedicine doctors, and kickbacks. Tests were reimbursed at $10,000 to $20,000 per sample. Medicare paid about $134 million of the billed amount, according to court-related reporting. Satary fled after failing to appear in 2022 and was caught with a fake Mexican passport under a false name. FBI Director Kash Patel called the arrest the third Most Wanted Fraudster capture in five weeks. Satary has been charged; he has not been convicted.

Those cases sit inside a larger 2026 enforcement wave. In June the Justice Department announced 455 defendants charged in connection with more than $6.5 billion in alleged false claims to Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs, plus foreign transfers of custody from Estonia, the Philippines, Turkey, and elsewhere. Other recent filings include an illegal alien from Georgia charged with laundering proceeds of a $1.3 billion durable-medical-equipment scheme tied to a Russia-based network. Vance’s task force has cited roughly $230 billion to $250 billion in suspected fraud identified by data analysis and tens of billions in payments stopped or deferred, including Medicaid holds in California and Minnesota. The vice president has repeatedly pointed to industrial-scale benefit fraud in Minnesota programs involving Somali-linked defendants and to illegal aliens drawing SNAP and Medicaid. House Republicans this week scheduled bills to force states to share fraud data with the Justice Department. Simsek remains a fugitive.