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The EyePic Case

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Medicaid July 2026

The $9 million eye-care fraud case was visible in public data for years

New York's Attorney General indicted Maksim Grinberg in February 2026 for allegedly billing Medicaid more than $9 million for eye surgeries that never happened. Federal claims data shows his six companies collected $34.1 million from Medicaid between 2018 and 2024, with a procedure-code fingerprint that stood out long before the charged period began.

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Medicaid payments to the six indicted eye-care companies climbed for years before the charged period
Total Medicaid paid amounts by calendar year, 2018 to 2024. The indictment covers January 2024 through July 2025; this dataset ends in December 2024.
By 2024, the six companies were 97% of New York's reported Medicaid billing for one eyelid procedure code
Statewide Medicaid paid amounts for HCPCS 68040 (expression of conjunctival follicles), split between the indicted companies and every other New York provider appearing in the public file.
Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity · Sources: HHS Open Data, NY Attorney General (2026)

The pattern was public long before the indictment. Prosecutors charged billing from January 2024 onward, but these companies' Medicaid payments grew from $2.2 million in 2018 to $8 million in 2023. Harlem Eye Care grew 60-fold over that stretch. All of it sat in a public federal dataset.

What the codes show: the indictment describes surgeries to remove scars from eyelid linings that never happened. In the claims data, the companies billed $726,000 for HCPCS 68040 in 2024 across 15,621 claim lines, plus $1.1 million for punctal plug closures (68761) and $2.4 million for office visit codes 99213 and 99214.

The case: In February 2026, Attorney General Letitia James and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced a 15-count indictment against Maksim Grinberg, charging that he stole more than $9 million from Medicaid by billing for eye surgeries that never happened through six eye-care companies operating as EyePic optical shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The charges are allegations; the defendant is presumed innocent unless convicted.

What these figures are: total Medicaid paid amounts to the six companies' billing NPIs in the T-MSIS claims data. They are payments, not a measure of how much of the billing was fraudulent; the indictment alleges $9 million in fraudulent billing between January 2024 and July 2025, a window this dataset covers only through December 2024 (and 2024 figures are preliminary).

Privacy suppression: the public file drops any provider-procedure-month cell with fewer than 12 claim lines or fewer than 12 beneficiaries, so a provider billing 68040 a handful of times a month is invisible here. The 97% is a share of reported billing; the six companies' volumes were high enough to clear the threshold in every visible month.

Entity matching: company names from the indictment were matched to billing NPIs in the CMS NPPES registry. MGBK Management, LLC, the seventh indicted entity, is a management company with no NPI and no claims. The full NPI list is in the methodology.

Sources: HHS Open Data, Medicaid Provider Spending by HCPCS (February 2026 release); CMS NPPES registry; NY Attorney General press release, February 2026.