Recruiters approached people struggling with addiction on streets throughout Oklahoma and offered a lifeline: treatment and housing, in beautiful Southern California, for free.

The recruiters knew that at a drug treatment facility, with the right insurance policy , they were worth tens of thousands of dollars.

“If you want to change your life around or even if you just want a free-ride vacation to California for three months or whatever, you know, here it is,” one recruiter told Derek Dunn in 2022.

Dunn took the bait.

So did more than 880 other Oklahomans, lured to drug treatment facilities in California and Arizona between 2020 and 2025, insurance company Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma alleged in two federal lawsuits. The company said the scheme cost them $46 million

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