A Nigerian medic who previously stole the identity of a brain damaged patient he was treating has been accused of scamming veterans out of millions in medical care. 

Cashmir Chinedu Luke, 61, was arrested inside San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday while trying to board a flight to Nigeria, where he is originally from. 

Prosecutors claim the dual US citizen used a company that he ran to illicit payments totaling $9.77 million dollars from the Department of Veterans Affairs over four years from 2019 to 2024. 

The money was paid out to his firm, Four Corners Health, to provide at home non-medical care for veterans, but prosecutors say such care never happened. 

Of that $9.77 million, he is said to have manufactured false claims of care provided to veterans totaling $7 million, or roughly 10,000 individual false claims.

The northern California company was supposed to provide care for veterans across Fresno, Tulare, Merced, Mariposa, Madera, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties.

It is alleged that he continued his scam even while a third-party assigned by the department attempted to try and recover the lost payments. 

In a court memorandum seen by the Daily Mail prosecutors said that Luke has a history of fraud and identity theft that dated back to 2006 when he stole the identity of one of his patients.

Luke was tried and convicted in 2009 Maryland on counts of conspiracy to commit identification document fraud and aggravated identity theft relating to the incident. 

He was found to have stolen the identity of a patient suffering a traumatic brain injury and submitted a fraudulent US passport application under their name in Pennsylvania. 

Luke was also found to have submitted a second application for a passport using the identity of his son in order to benefit an unknown third-party.

According to the affidavit he was hit with 37 months, or just over three years, behind bars after being convicted. His Maryland state pharmacy license was also revoked. 

His alleged fraud was noticed by administrators when bills came through which included claims for 28 hours of care provided by a single worker in one day. 

Investigators also said that Luke's company billed the department $141,926.92 for services provided to a veteran until February 2023 who had died in August 2022. 

After further analyzing the payments, administrators said they uncovered a significant number of duplicate claims paid out to the company. 

Luke entered an agreement to pay $2.8 million back and admitted to the overpayment, but is said to have failed to make any of the promised repayments. 

After being chased by lawyers to start making the repayments, he is accused of attempting to evade them and process servers.

Prosecutors say he went as far as changing the name of his company and giving an attorney a fake phone number and address. Court papers said he lived in a $620,000 house in Stockton. 

Out of the $7 million he is said to have fraudulently claimed, prosecutors say he siphoned off at least $1.6 million to offshore accounts in Asia and Africa. 

The memorandum noted that Luke owns a significant amount of property in Nigeria, which includes 80 commercial and non-commercial plots of land in Lagos. 

Following his arrest at San Francisco International Airport, authorities seized both his US and and Nigeran passports.

Court papers also said that prosecutors feared that he might be able to flee the country due to his past conviction for identity theft. 

If convicted he could be imprisoned for ten years behind bars and hit with a maximum fine of $250,000.