Banks finance dental practices at nearly 100%. That frenzy makes everyone sloppy. This buyer walked into a practice where the seller was billing insurance for patients who never sat in the chair — and nobody caught it because the asset class had everyone salivating. ►EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1) $1M FRAUD HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT — BECAUSE BANKS LOVE DENTAL DEALS: Banks finance dental practices at nearly 100%. That frenzy makes everyone sloppy. This buyer walked into a practice where the seller was billing insurance for patients who never sat in the chair — and nobody caught it because the asset class had everyone salivating. 2) MEDICARE FRAUD IS A TIME BOMB WITH A LONG FUSE: Government payers are terrible at catching fraud in real time — but their audits are ruthless. The seller was running a phantom-billing scheme that gutted roughly half the practice's EBITDA. If you don't audit the insurance payer relationships yourself, you're buying someone else's federal investigation. 3) THE SELLER FLED TO THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — AND STILL WENT TO PRISON: Deal closes, seller bolts to a foreign country, buyer discovers the crater. The DR extradited him, he did time, and the buyer was still left digging out of a hole with half his cash flow gone. Justice doesn't fix your balance sheet. 4) THE MILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION NOBODY ASKED: "WHO'S THE EXPERT IN THIS ROOM?" Every one of these horror stories traces back to the same failure — no one paid for the right expert at the right time. The QoE fee you're trying to save is a rounding error next to the fraud you won't catch without it.