Abandoned Illinois lab office stacked with thousands of unopened insurance letters raises fraud concerns

Katie Duda was reviewing her insurance paperwork when something caught her eye—a $500 lab charge from a company she had never visited. The charge appeared on her Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas explanation of benefits, and it didn't make sense. She decided to track down the source.

Duda and her mother traced the lab, Niyraa LLC, to a strip center in Crystal Lake, Illinois. What they found was unsettling. The office door was unlocked. A sign instructed visitors to drop off mail inside. When they stepped through, they found no one working there. The space felt abandoned. Concerned about what she'd discovered, Duda contacted CBS News Chicago.

Over the course of several months, reporter Marissa Sulek and her team visited the office five separate times. Each visit revealed the same disturbing scene: thousands of pieces of mail, predominantly from various Blue Cross Blue Shield entities, sat in U.S. Postal Service bins on the front desk. The journalists alerted Crystal Lake police, the FBI, and U.S. Postal Service Inspectors about the accumulating mail and the risk to people's personal information. Yet on each subsequent visit, the mail remained. It had simply been relocated—moved from the front desk to the back room, now stuffed into growing piles of black and white garbage bags.

The name Mohammed I Quadri appeared on the lab's signage, certifications, and official documentation. CBS News Chicago made multiple attempts to reach him—emails, text messages, phone calls, and visits to addresses connected to his name. Nothing worked. The mall owner confirmed he hadn't seen Quadri in months, though rent continued to be paid. The journalists even staked out the office during business hours on a weekday. Quadri never appeared.

To understand what might actually be happening inside this ghost office, CBS News Chicago brought in James Scordo, a certified fraud examiner and forensic accountant. Walking through the space, Scordo observed pristine lab equipment, unopened packages of vials and supplies that had sat untouched for months, and the mountainous piles of mail, some envelopes now scattered across the floor. His assessment was direct: "It appears this is a front for a fraud scheme. I mean, it has all the signs." Scordo believed the operation represented phantom billing—a scheme in which Blue Cross Blue Shield pays Quadri for lab services that patients never actually received. The patients remain unaware their insurer is being billed for work that was never performed. Beyond the financial fraud, Scordo warned that if these lab tests were never conducted, the fraudulent charges could contaminate patients' medical records and jeopardize their ability to obtain insurance in the future. Each unopened envelope represented a potential victim.

Brittany Serby, who owns the Functional Wellness Clinic a few storefronts away, expressed frustration about the situation. She had never seen Quadri and was deeply troubled by what appeared to be happening. "It doesn't feel like anything is being done to stop whatever is happening," she said. The U.S. Postal Service Inspector General's office confirmed it was investigating, though it had not secured the mail for protection during the months CBS News Chicago documented its presence. The FBI alerted local law enforcement and sanitary crews about the mail in case it was discarded.

In recent weeks, neighboring business owners provided photos showing the garbage bags of mail had been removed—by unknown parties. Fresh mail, however, had already been dropped off and was sitting on the front desk. As of mid-September, the office appeared empty from the outside, but the door remained unlocked and the sign inviting mail delivery was still taped to the door. Blue Cross Blue Shield declined to comment on any provider relationships, leaving the thousands of patients whose information sits in that office without answers about what happened to their data or their medical records.