BATON ROUGE - Three Baton Rouge residents were sentenced to federal prison for posing as medical professionals to obtain prescription drugs and defrauding federal benefits programs, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Kevan Andre Hills, 31, Devin Tyrone Stampley Jr., 33 and Asia Deshan Guess, 28, all admitted that they conspired to submit fraudulent prescriptions for drugs like promethazine with codeine and hydrocodone. Stampley was sentenced to over eight and a half years, Hills was sentenced to eight years and Guess was sentenced for two years.

Prosecutors said the three used the Drug Enforcement Administration registration numbers and other identifying information of several physicians to fraudulently bill Medicaid for thousands in prescriptions.

Part of the scheme, prosecutors said, was Stampley's burglary of a Louisiana pharmacy. Hills and Stampley also fraudulently submitted $293,498 worth of applications to the Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program and other government benefits.

In total, they defrauded $87,663 in PPP loans by posing as "fake small business owners and residents in need of assistance."

Hills and Stampley then transferred these funds to make personal purchases.

Guess also attempted to defraud $125,978 from benefits programs and was successfully awarded $15,859 from fraudulent unemployment claims from the Louisiana Workforce Commission and the Maine Department of Labor.