A woman has become the first person convicted in an fraud case involving fake sober living homes in Arizona.
The court ordered 37-year old Ariell Olivia Dix to pay $3,863,036.15 in restitution for her role in the Illegal Control of an Enterprise – a crime for which she was sentenced to prison for 3.5 years in May 2024.
The Court had been informed by the Attorney General’s Office that Dix had moved to the Phoenix-metro area, from Nevada, to establish Behavioral Health Care Treatment facilities for the purpose of defrauding the American Indian Health Program (AIHP) within the Arizona State Medicaid Program – AHCCCS.
At the time of her move to Arizona, Dix had been permanently excluded from Nevada’s State Medicaid Program for her criminal role in defrauding the Nevada Medicaid program. Dix had devised and facilitated an unrelenting and corrupt billing pattern of extreme treatment hours across all dates, ranges, and AHCCCS patients as she provided a seemingly ever-expanding billing pattern for the sole purpose of maximizing the prospective amount of illicit proceeds. As a result of Dix’s conduct, between 2019 and 2022, AHCCCS was defrauded of millions of taxpayer dollars.