BOSTON — The former chief financial officer of a Boston-area spinal implant company was sentenced to prison for conspiring to pay surgeons more than $540,000 in bribes to use the company’s products.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, 41-year-old Aditya Humad of Cambridge, the former chief financial officer of SpineFrontier Inc., was sentenced on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026, by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, to four months in prison followed by one year of supervised release. Humad was also ordered to pay a $9,500 fine.
In May, Humad pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute. He was originally charged in September 2021 alongside SpineFrontier’s Founder, President and CEO Dr. Kingsley R. Chin.
SpineFrontier, Inc., a spinal implant company, was formerly based in Malden.
Federal prosecutors say Humad conspired to pay and directed the payment of more than $540,000 in bribes to surgeons in the form of sham consulting fees for work they did not perform. In exchange, the surgeons used SpineFrontier products in surgeries that generated millions of dollars in revenue for the company.
“This sentence is the culmination of years of dogged pursuit of SpineFrontier, its executives, Aditya Humad and Kingsley Chin, and multiple bribe-taking doctors,” U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley said. Later adding, ““In criminal and civil proceedings, we have recovered more than $4 million from these executives, their companies and the physicians who took their bribes. Let these resolutions serve as notice that no matter how long it takes, and how sophisticated the scheme, we will crack down on health care fraud offenses.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts reported that Humad conspired with SpineFrontier to enter into contracts that paid surgeons between $250 and $1,000 per hour for purported consulting work on behalf of SpineFrontier. In reality, Humad directed SpineFrontier to pay the surgeons for using SpineFrontier’s products.
“Although the surgeon-consulting program was purportedly directed at gathering technical feedback about SpineFrontier’s products, 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 the Veterans Health Administration,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in a statement. “Additionally, the surgeons frequently spent only a small fraction of their reported time, if any, performing actual consulting.”
Humad previously agreed to pay more than $150,000, including interest, as part of a civil settlement, with potential additional contingency payments based on his annual income.
Chin pleaded guilty in May 2025 to making false statements to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and was sentenced in August 2025 to one year of supervised release, with the first six months served in home confinement. Chin was also ordered to pay a $9,500 fine. He separately agreed to pay $40,000 as part of a related civil settlement agreement, while his wholly owned company agreed to pay $855,000 as part of the same settlement, according to federal prosecutors.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts reported that, in a related criminal prosecution, Dr. Jason Montone, a 50-year-old surgeon from Lawson, Missouri, pleaded guilty in August 2020 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 witness tampering. Montone and Balzer are scheduled to be sentenced in September 2026.
In additional related civil enforcement, in March 2020, five doctors agreed to pay civil settlements to resolve allegations that they accepted sham consulting fees in violation of the False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statute: Dr. F. Paul DeGenova agreed to pay $486,985; Dr. Michael Murray agreed to pay $330,668; Dr. Joseph Shehadi agreed to pay $323,419; Dr. Agha Khan agreed to pay $310,843; and Dr. John Atwater agreed to pay $105,149. The following month (i.e., April 2020), Dr. John Carlson agreed to pay $1.75 million to resolve the same allegations.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Abraham R. George, Christopher R. Looney, and Mackenzie A. Queenin prosecuted the case.
