BOSTON — The chief financial officer of SpineFrontier Inc., a spinal implant company formerly based in Malden, has admitted to a kickback scheme that bribed surgeons to use company products in exchange for sham consulting fees, the U.S. Attorney said Tuesday.
Aditya Humad, 41, of Cambridge, pleaded guilty on Monday to one count of conspiracy to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute, U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said in a statement.
U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani scheduled sentencing for Aug. 6.
Humad was charged in September 2021, along with the company SpineFrontier, and Dr. Kingsley R. Chin, SpineFrontier’s founder, president, and CEO.
Prosecutors said Humad paid and conspired to pay over $540,000 in bribes to surgeons in the form of sham consulting fees for work they did not perform. Humad and Chin bribed surgeons to use SpineFrontier’s products, and, in turn, SpineFrontier received millions of dollars in revenue from surgeries performed by those surgeons.
Humad entered into contracts with surgeons, agreeing to pay them between $250 and $1,000 per hour for purported consulting services to SpineFrontier, prosecutors said.
In reality, however, Humad and Chin paid the surgeons for using SpineFrontier’s products.
Although the surgeon-consulting program was purportedly directed at gathering technical feedback about SpineFrontier’s products, prosecutors said Humad used the bribes they paid pursuant to that program to induce surgeons to use SpineFrontier’s products in surgeries that were paid for by federal health care programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Health Administration.
Additionally, the surgeons frequently spent only a small fraction of their reported time, if any, performing actual consulting.
Humad previously agreed to pay a fine pursuant to a civil settlement agreement, including a fixed amount totaling more than $150,000, including interest, and agreed to potential additional contingency payments based upon Humad’s annual income.
Chin pleaded guilty in May 2025 to making false statements to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He was subsequently sentenced in August 2025 to one year of supervised release with the first six months to be served in home confinement.
Chin was also ordered to pay a $9,500 fine, in addition to the $40,000 he personally agreed to pay as part of a related civil settlement and the $855,000 his wholly-owned company agreed to pay as part of the same settlement.
This plea also follows two guilty pleas in related criminal prosecutions.
In August 2020, Dr. Jason Montone, 50, a surgeon from Lawson, Mississippi, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute and obstruction.
Medical device distributor John Balzer, 48, of Lenexa, Kansas, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute and one count of witness tampering.
Montone and Balzer are scheduled to be sentenced in September 2026.
For the charge of conspiring to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute, Humad faces a sentence of up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or gross loss resulting from the offense, whichever is greater, forfeiture, and restitution.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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