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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIndianapolis-based health care insurer Elevance Health Inc. is suing a Brooklyn, New York-based autism-therapy provider, alleging it created a network of more than 100 shell companies that submitted fraudulent insurance claims, resulting in more than $160 million in payments.
The lawsuit, filed Nov. 4 in New York state court, accuses The Perfect Child LLC and founder Simcha Bendet of circumventing insurance contracts, billing for services that were not provided, submitting fraudulent claims and threatening families with massive bills when the insurer challenged reimbursement payments.
An Elevance spokesperson said the company declined to comment beyond the lawsuit. Neither Bendet nor Alan Schabes, a Cleveland-based lawyer representing The Perfect Child, responded to requests for comment from IBJ.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that the FBI is investigating The Perfect Child’s billing practices. The federal investigation follows another Journal report that The Perfect Child charged rates that exceeded $30,000 per day for therapy services, assured patients they would face little or no out-of-pocket costs and collected alleged debts from families.
Elevance’s lawsuit alleges The Perfect Child’s conduct amounted to breach of contract, conspiracy, fraud, negligence and other claims. Elevance offers Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield-affiliated health insurance plans in 14 states.
The Perfect Child and affiliated companies submitted nearly $800 million in insurance claims since 2021. Anthem said it denied many of the claims, including more than $102 million in duplicate claims, but paid more than $160 million between January 2021 and March 2026.
“Sadly, Defendants’ get-rich-quick scheme targets vulnerable families with children seeking treatment for autism spectrum disorder,” the lawsuit says. “Defendants lured in families looking for help by promoting their immediate availability for appointments. Once services started, families became confused by rapidly changing corporate names and different direct care providers seeing their children at each appointment.”
The complaint says The Perfect Child entered into an agreement with Anthem in February 2020 as an in-network provider to provide applied behavior analysis, or ABA, therapy to children with autism. The therapy is designed to help children develop communication, social and daily living skills.
The company advertised that it accepted Anthem insurance and had no waiting list, but it allegedly transferred patients to affiliated companies outside Anthem’s provider network without informing families or obtaining their consent.
Those companies billed Anthem at significantly higher rates than what The Perfect Child agreed to receive under its contract with Anthem, according to the lawsuit.
The Perfect Child billed Anthem less than $500,000 since 2020, but the complaint says the affiliated companies submitted nearly $800 million in claims.
The lawsuit cites examples of alleged fraudulent billing, including one instance in which the defendants submitted claims for 252-1/2 hours of therapy for a single child in one day. Anthem also alleged the companies billed for at least 12 hours of treatment for an individual child on nearly 2,000 occasions.
In November 2025, two affiliate companies called KIEDGA LLC and FUBRSIG LLC allegedly submitted identical bills for seven hours of therapy for the same child, resulting in $50,400 in duplicate charges.
The complaint notes that FUBRSIG, which billed more than $36 million since 2022 to Anthem, has a name that mocks one of Anthem’s in-house investigators by “seemingly saying (in the form of a corporate name) ‘FU’ to Brian Signorelli, a senior investigator in Anthem’s Special Investigations Unit.”
KIEDGA billed Anthem $2,400 in 2024 before increasing its claims to $85.2 million 2025, according to the lawsuit. Another company called CODOGA LLC increased its claims from $93,700 to $87.5 million during the same period.
The lawsuit also says one child’s treatment generated more than $3 million in claims over 13 months from six different companies even though the child saw the same behavioral analyst.
Anthem also alleges that some services were never provided. For example, a therapist allegedly acted as a babysitter and offered to clean a family’s home for a fee rather than providing autism therapy.
The complaint says employees of The Perfect Child were instructed to impersonate parents and guardians when appealing denied insurance claims.
It adds that Bendet allegedly instructed employees to resubmit rejected claims through different companies, sometimes changing billing details to avoid detection. In other instances, employees were instructed to change the reported place of service to telehealth.
The lawsuit also accuses the defendants of waiving families’ out-of-pocket costs to encourage them to continue treatment and threatening collection actions or lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars when families questioned the billing practices.
Anthem notified The Perfect Child in June that it was terminating its provider agreement, which ended Sept. 3.
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