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Eighteen former NBA players were charged Thursday with pocketing about $2.5 million illegally by defrauding the league’s health and welfare benefit plan in a scam that authorities said involved claiming fictitious medical and dental expenses. “The defendants’ playbook involved fraud and deception,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss told a news conference after FBI agents across the country arrested 15 ex-players and one of their wives in a three-year conspiracy that authorities say started in 2017. According to an indictment returned in Manhattan federal court, the ex-players teamed up to defraud the supplemental coverage plan by submitting fraudulent claims to get reimbursed for medical and dental procedures that never happened. (Neumeister and Reynolds (AP), 10/7)

Greg Smith had been out of the National Basketball Association for about two years in December 2018, when the former power forward for the Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavericks had what appeared to be a long day at a dental office in Beverly Hills. Invoices submitted on his behalf showed that he received IV sedation and root canals, and had crowns placed on eight teeth. But the invoices, totaling $47,900, were fake, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Thursday. (Weiser and Bromwich, 10/7)

In one instance, she said, an ex-player was playing basketball in Taiwan when he was supposedly getting $48,000 worth of root canals and crowns on eight teeth at a Beverly Hills, California, dental office in December 2018.The indictment said the scheme was carried out from at least 2017 to 2020, when the plan — funded primarily by NBA teams — received false claims totaling about $3.9 million. Of that, the defendants received about $2.5 million in fraudulent proceeds. (Neumeister and Reynolds, 10/7)

The Drug Enforcement Administration is investigating Ryan Vermillion, the Washington Football Team’s director of sports medicine and head athletic trainer, for the possible disbursement of prescription drugs, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation. Federal law prohibits anyone other than a physician or nurse practitioner from giving out prescription medication, and it bars physicians from dispensing prescription drugs where he or she is unauthorized to practice. (Jhabvala, 10/7)