Aleya Siyaj

Identity and role

Aleya Siyaj co-owned the Center for COVID Control, LLC (CCC), an Illinois COVID-19 testing company, with Akbar Ali Syed. Oregon's April 2022 complaint says the two formed CCC in December 2020, that CCC named Siyaj its manager, and that they co-owned it throughout. The Arizona Attorney General's office described her in August 2022 as CCC's owner and Syed as her husband.

Biography / career arc

According to Oregon's complaint, before forming CCC Siyaj and Syed ran an axe-throwing lounge and a photography studio and had no experience in the medical field or in medical testing. CCC started as a single test site in Siyaj's former axe-throwing lounge. From June 2021, CCC and its partner laboratory, Doctors Clinical Laboratory (DCL), shared a principal office at 1685 Winnetka Circle in Rolling Meadows, Illinois.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

CCC opened and managed COVID-19 test sites and sent samples to DCL, which ran the PCR tests and sought reimbursement from the federal government and insurers. Oregon's complaint says CCC and DCL opened about 300 test sites across the United States in less than a year, five of them in Oregon, after rapid expansion in the fall of 2021.

The Washington Attorney General's January 31, 2022 lawsuit alleged that CCC stored samples in garbage bags for more than a week instead of refrigerating them, backdated collection dates so stale samples would still be processed, and gave false, delayed or no results. It also alleged that CCC billed the federal government a reported $124 million for tests of "uninsured" patients and marked insured patients as uninsured. These are allegations.

On or about January 13, 2022, CCC announced that it would pause specimen collection from January 14, according to Oregon's complaint.

Their own relief

Neither the SBA's public PPP loan-level data (September 30, 2024 release) nor the USAspending COVID-EIDL award files we searched list a loan to a borrower named Aleya Siyaj or Center for COVID Control. The money at issue in the cases was testing reimbursement, not a relief loan.

Legal status / controversies

The cases against Siyaj are civil. No criminal charge against her appears in our archive.

Arizona. On August 4, 2022 the Attorney General announced a consent judgment, pending court approval, against CCC, Siyaj and Syed. It permanently bars all three from performing medical testing services in Arizona, including marketing, data management, sample handling, compliance, training and customer service for such services.
Wisconsin. On October 26, 2022 the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection announced a stipulated consent judgment in Dane County with Siyaj and Syed, doing business as CCC, over misleading advertising of COVID-19 testing between December 2, 2020 and January 21, 2022. They are jointly and individually responsible for $11,250 in civil forfeitures plus $11,250 in surcharges, fees and costs, for a total of $22,500.
Oregon. The Attorney General sued CCC and DCL, not Siyaj or Syed personally, in Multnomah County Circuit Court in April 2022 under the Unlawful Trade Practices Act; the outcome is not in our records.
Washington. The January 2022 lawsuit in King County Superior Court named the company; the release does not report a resolution.
Federal. United States v. Center for Covid Control (N.D. Ill. No. 1:22-cv-00868), filed February 17, 2022 and assigned to Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins, was terminated on February 26, 2025; the docket shows a judgment entered on February 28, 2025. We do not have a copy of the judgment.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

CCC's test sites closed in January 2022. The federal case against the company closed in February 2025, and that docket is our latest record touching CCC. We have no later record of Siyaj.

Sources held in this archive

Center for Covid Control Five Years On

Akbar Syed — co-owner of CCC; named with Siyaj in the Arizona and Wisconsin judgments.