politics
California Business Owner Jia Bei Zhu Convicted of Selling Over a Million Faulty COVID-19 Tests
A federal jury convicted 64-year-old Jia Bei Zhu on 10 counts including wire fraud and false statements to the FDA after he sold nearly $4 million worth of faulty tests through Universal Meditech Inc. The scheme ran from August 2020 to March 2023, involving imported kits from China misrepresented as FDA-approved and U.S.-made.
May 6, 10:17 PM·2m read1 source
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A federal jury convicted 64-year-old Chinese national Jia Bei Zhu of selling more than a million fraudulent COVID-19 tests nationwide. New York Post reported that Zhu fraudulently sold nearly $4 million worth of the faulty tests out of his Fresno-based company Universal Meditech Inc.
The jury found Zhu guilty on one count of making a false statement to the FDA, eight counts of substantive wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Between August 2020 and March 2023, Zhu, his romantic partner Zhaoyan Wang and others at Universal Meditech Inc conspired to import faulty COVID tests from China and sell them to customers based on lies. Zhu lied that the tests were approved by the FDA, that they were made in the USA, that they came from a certified lab and that they actually worked.
Trial evidence showed Zhu and Wang hired employees that wouldn’t ask questions.
Some employees knew the tests were fraudulent but were too afraid of losing their job or too scared of Zhu to stop selling them. The scheme was first uncovered in mid-2022 after one of his victims filed a civil lawsuit against Universal Meditech Inc. Authorities discovered an unsanitary facility lacking proper medical equipment to make tests at the Fresno lab.
They also found hundreds of boxes of COVID tests from China at the site. Zhu then moved the operation to a clandestine lab in Reedley, 20 miles south of Fresno. He changed the name of the lab and his own name and lied to authorities about his connection to Universal Meditech Inc or the new lab.
