Alleged $38M adult day care scam busted in Brooklyn -- snaring Pakistani community leaders who cozied up to Dems
A prominent Pakistani-American businessman who spent years cozying up to powerful Democrats stands accused of being part of a $38 million Medicaid scam.
Civic leader and well-known Brooklyn Community Board 13 member Pervez Siddiqui, 78, was arrested Monday along with seven co-conspirators.
They are alleged to have run a large-scale Medicaid kickback and false-billing scheme through two social adult day care (SADC) centers in Brooklyn: APNA Adult Daycare and Ashiana Social Adult Daycare.
The scam ran from 2019 through December 2025, feds allege, with seniors being signed up for day cares that they rarely or never attended, then getting a cut of the Medicaid payment.
"Marketers are going around looking for the Medicaid card. They stop people on the street, at bus stops. They go into doctors' offices. They go into NYCHA [government housing] where they know people are low-income. They ask, 'Do you have a Medicaid card?'" a source with knowledge of the investigation told The Post.
Siddiqui, who owns around 15 pharmacies in New Jersey, is prolific in local political circles and a regular donor to Democratic campaigns, sometimes shelling out over $10,000 a pop to local candidates, records show. And through his ties to another group, he scored an intimate sit-down with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in December 2025, pictures obtained by The Post show.
Shazia Bibi (a.k.a. Shazia Wattoo), Abdul Aziz, Shair Ali, and their recruiter co-defendants Zebun Ahmed, Josna Begum, Saira Khatoon, and Atia Shahnaz were also involved, according to the unsealed indictment against them.
The gang paid cash bribes directly to New York Medicaid recipients to enroll at APNA or Ashiana -- even though most never attended their facilities -- and paid the recruiters kickbacks to refer patients, while submitting $38 million in fraudulent claims to New York Medicaid for services that were never provided, according to the indictment.
Shockingly, the indictment says the payments were made even when enrollees were not in the US. The sources claimed many had even gone to live in other countries while they or their family members collected Medicaid kickback money.
"The patient is in Pakistan, they're in Morocco. They're not even in this country," the source claimed.
