Oregon — Versa Force LLC, the Washington company that enticed homeless people to move into a Portland house, free of charge, and required Oregon residents to fraudulently enroll in Washington’s Medicaid program for nightly Zoom counseling sessions with a nurse practitioner in Texas, is not where it says it is. It’s not in the Vancouver strip mall its website claims is its place of business. The Vancouver address the company required its Oregon residents to use in applying for Washington benefits, despite never having lived there, is the longtime home of a homeless shelter, where staff has never heard of Versa Force.
Meanwhile, the Versa Force-operated house located on the leafy, suburban cul-de-sac Tippitt Place continues to operate, according to two neighbors, one of whom told Oregon Roundup Foundation they keep their distance from the house, calling it “weird.” No one answered the door at the Versa Force house itself.
ORF’s exclusive reporting, including interviews with two former residents of Versa Force’s house on Tippitt Place in Portland, uncovered the company’s practice of giving Portland area homeless people a place to live, so long as they helped the company defraud Medicaid by applying for Washington benefits, using an address they had never lived at, and forcing them out of the house when they asked questions about the practice.
Versa Force’s website says the company is located at a strip mall on Coxley Drive in Vancouver.
The commercial complex on Coxley houses a self storage business, a pawn broker and various other businesses, but Versa Force does not appear on signage or store fronts. A woman working at the self-storage business told Oregon Roundup Foundation that as far as she knew, Versa Force had never been located in the complex.
Damian Fagerlie, a former resident of Versa Force’s Portland house, told Oregon Roundup Foundation the company instructed him to apply for Washington Medicaid benefits using a false home address of 5609 NE 102nd Avenue in Vancouver. At the time, Fagerlie had lived in Oregon for approximately five years, and had never lived at the Vancouver address Versa Force instructed him to use as his home address for Washington Medicaid. It is illegal for a Medicaid-supported provider to require patients to apply for Medicaid benefits in a state in which they do not live.
Oregon Roundup Foundation visited the 102nd Avenue address last Thursday. There, the staff person who answered the doorbell of the locked facility said it was a homeless shelter called Share Orchards Inn, and she had never heard of Versa Force.
On Wednesday and Thursday last week, no one at the Versa Force-operated house on Tippitt Place answered the door. The house appeared empty, with black garbage bags piled in the attached carport. However, two residents of the cul-de-sac told Oregon Roundup Foundation people still lived in the house. A male who lived in a sober living house, operated by a different company, said he had seen police vehicles at the Versa Force house previously, and that he keeps his distance from the house, which was “definitely not sober,” because he thought it was “weird.” ORF’s previous reporting on Versa Force showed the house manager provided alcohol to the formerly homeless residents of the house.
Photos taken by Fagerlie at the Versa Force house, provided to ORF, suggest Versa Force is connected with Julius Maximo, who is at the center of a host of LLCs purporting to provide Medicaid-funded services in the Portland area.
Maximo is at the center of an array of Oregon limited liability companies that were in various stages of operating houses providing Medicaid-funded counseling to residents prior to Oregon Roundup Foundation’s exclusive reporting on the company. Uplifting Journey operated a house in Lake Oswego from approximately February 2024 to June 2025. The Oregon Health Plan paid the company $2.3 million from April 2024 to March 2025, according to records obtained by ORF. King County, WA prosecutors allege two men living in Uplifting Journey’s Lake Oswego house traveled to the Seattle area in January 2025, kidnapped, robbed and tortured a woman before shooting her and leaving her for dead near the summit of Snoqualmie Pass.
On September 24, 2025, the State of Oregon terminated Uplifting Journey’s right to receive Medicaid reimbursements, following ORF’s reporting on Uplifting Journey and a letter from State Rep. Ed Diehl (R-Scio) to state officials demanding an investigation based on that reporting.
Uplifting Journey entered into a lease for residential real property in Gresham, Oregon, in November 2024, presumably to establish another house for people receiving Medicaid-funded counseling. The lease is signed by Maximo on behalf of Uplifting Journey, and co-signed by a Theodore Mucuranyana. Mucuranyana is under indictment by the Arizona Attorney General for laundering $5 million in fraudulent Medicaid payments in a scheme in which behavioral health providers allegedly lured Arizonans into a massive $60 million Medicaid fraud operation.
The Maximo-related documents located at the Versa Force house include a financial sponsorship form in which Maximo represented he would bear financial responsibility for a woman living in Uganda if she is permitted to immigrate to the United States.
Oregon Roundup Foundation created this article. ORF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation dedicated to covering Oregon political and government news.
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