Originally published at: Women with real estate degree masqueraded as a physician for three years, saw patients, prescribed medicine | Boing Boing
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That seems remarkably lenient considering the potential harm to life and health, especially given that she hadn’t even finished paying her debt to society for the previous round of crimes.
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To make matters worse, for most of her time as a physician, Sonia wore a tagging bracelet around her ankle, for crimes committed previous to her appointment as a GP.
I see the ankle bracelet system was effective. “What is she up to?” “Nothing suspicious. Spends a lot of time at this Doctors office for some reason.” 
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Think I figured out who was responsible for her parole…
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Frank Abagnale supposedly posed as a doctor and committed many, many fraud-related crimes but ended up serving just 3 years in federal prison. Of course he wasn’t criminally charged for everything that he claims to have done.
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I guess the lesson is that charismatic fraudsters can be just as effective at winning over people in the courtroom and legal system as any other marks.
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I think another lesson is that it’s hard to catch people doing things like this. If someone opens up an office, puts a diploma on the wall, and starts seeing patients, who is going to notice and stop them? It probably requires a patient to become suspicious and report them or similar event before they are caught. Nobody is going door to door and validating everyone’s medical licenses every week.
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Idk insurance companies? Or was she a cash only operation?
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I guess it depends on the country. This was apparently in France, and I don’t know how the system works there. They have socialized medicine, but I don’t know how it works in detail enough to say. Presumably you could not get away with billing the single payer because they would ask for some sort of ID number. However every socialized system has gaps. Not everything is covered. For example in Canada, dentistry is not covered in most (all?) provinces, so a rogue dentist could exist for quite a while, I imagine.
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I had a “doctor” once who turned out to be a fraud. He was actually hired by a practice that was part of a group of practices, somewhere that you think would follow up on degrees, etc… I only saw him once and he struck me as odd, he actually spent too much time talking to me during the appointment.
The only really bad part is that he checked my prostate, so…
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