In California, Christopher Bathum’s Community Recovery Los Angeles was shut down when he and his CFO, Kirsten Wallace, were charged with fraud. They worked together to con their clients and insurance companies out of money. ABC News’ ’20/20: Rehab Mogul’ talks about the many accusations that have been made against Christopher and his company. So, if you want to know what happened to Kirsten after the party, we’ve got you covered.
Kirsten Wallace: Who Is She?
When Kirsten was a child, she lived in Coffs Harbour, Australia. To be with her mother, she moved from the United States in 1999. It was about seven years after that, when Kirsten and her daughter moved to the United States and started a new life there, As time went on, she became a part of Christopher’s company as the CFO. In the early years of the 2010s, CRLA was doing well as a high-end addiction treatment centre.
People who have insurance now have to pay for addiction treatment and recovery because of the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2012. Consequently, anyone who had insurance could get $100,000 a month from the insurance company. This made rehab owners more likely to work. “Sober living homes,” as they were called at the time, were not regulated at all. He ran the facilities through a legal loophole so that they were not actually rehabilitation centers, but he was still able to run them.
Christopher and Kirsten then ran a complicated insurance scheme in the years before they were arrested, but they were never caught. Before buying health insurance policies under the names of patients who didn’t know they had been hacked, they lied about their situation to get the insurance. They also kept billing former clients even though they didn’t get treatment while they worked at CRLA. In many cases, Christopher and Kirsten charged for services they didn’t do.
Kirsten Wallace: Where Is She At Present?
Between June 2012 and December 2015, the authorities thought Christopher and Kirsten billed about $175 million for things they didn’t do. About $44 million was paid out by five different insurance firms. This is what happened with Kirsten in March 2018. She pleaded guilty to five insurance fraud charges, seven grand theft charges for taking people’s things and six charges of identity theft. She also admitted 28 counts of money laundering. When she was 44 years old, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison for a crime. There is no way to know for sure where Kirsten is serving her sentence.