Two pharmacy technicians from Essex County, N.J., pleaded guilty for their role in a scheme to defraud Medicaid by buying prescription forms for HIV/AIDS drugs from indigent patients.

Ten people were charged in grand-jury indictments, handed up Oct. 26, 2009, with participating in the scheme, which used pharmacy owners and employees to buy the forms so Medicaid could be billed for drugs that were never dispensed, according to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office.

Jannah Rasheedah Amatul Muid, 26, of East Orange, N.J., and Alicia Stephens, 29, of Newark, N.J., each pleaded guilty to third-degree Medicaid fraud before Superior Court Judge Michael A. Petrolle in Essex County.

They each face up to three years in prison and $10,000 in fines at sentencing, scheduled for March 8.

Muid and Stephens, technicians at Pharmacy of America in East Orange, admitted that between May 11, 2006, and October 15, 2008, that they paid Medicaid beneficiaries for prescriptions and subsequently billed the Medicaid Program for prescription drugs that were never dispensed to the Medicaid beneficiaries.

The charges were a result of Operation PharmScam, an ongoing investigation targeting Medicaid fraud that began in 2008 and has been conducted by the Office of Insurance Fraud Prosecutor’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, the Jersey City Police Department and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations.