A Texas Department of Insurance investigator and crime analyst helped identify a Russian national who reported reported $400 million in fake Medicare claims.
Nikolai Buzolin was living in Houston in 2025 when he created a durable medical equipment company and stole patients' and doctors' identities to submit f
ake claims to health plans that administer Medicare Part C. He opened eight bank accounts to deposit the $1.7 million he received in reimbursements, according to the TDI.
A few patients checked their explanation of benefits and noticed that they were getting medical
equipment that they didn't need coming from doctors they'd never met, according to Sgt. Kevin Mannion, a TDI fraud unit investigator.
Mannion is part of the FBI Task Force in Houston that surveilled and investigated Buzolin. When a task force went to his house in Houston, he had already fled. A TDI c
rime analyst then tracked his car to Los Angeles where local FBI agents arrested Buzolin as he was boarding a plane to Russia.
Buzolin faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
More than 100 homeowners have charged in a lawsuit that officials in Sarasota County, Florida
a, failed to maintain a dike for years, allowing Hurricane Debby's floodwaters to inundate homes throughout an upscale subdivision.
“Engineering modeling analysis has confirmed that without the breach of the Cow Pen Slough dike, there would have been no flooding of the interior of t
he homes in Laurel Meadows,” reads the lawsuit complaint, filed this month in Sarasota County Circuit Court.
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Hurricane Debby grazed the western flank of the Florida peninsula in August 2024, deluging some areas with as much as 17 inches of rain over a three-day period, t
he suit notes. Some homes in the Laurel Meadows subdivision saw as much as 24 inches of water in
side, causing extensive damage to drywall, floors, fixtures, appliances and belongings—and forcing residents to move out temporarily.
While the subdivision is near a group of lakes, it had never experienced such flooding before, the complaint alleges.
“Although major storm events have, at times, flooded the streets in Laurel Meadows, the home
s within that subdivision had never suffered interior flood intrusion as a result of those major storm events, prior to August 4, 2024,” the suit reads.
