Matthew Lani, a young South African man with over 3oo,000 followers on TikTok, was recently arrested for allegedly posing as a doctor and sharing medical advice without having any medical experience.

27-year-old Matthew Bogani Lani rose to internet fame when he started claiming that he was one of the youngest doctors in South Africa. He often told his followers that he was somewhat of a wunderkind, skipping several high-school grades entirely to graduate at age 16, before enrolling at Wits University to study medicine. He often filmed himself patrolling through hospitals dressed in white and wearing a stethoscope around his neck, claiming to be on his way to see patients and even dishing out medical advice to his followers, or selling them medication. He wouldn’t be the first doctor to do this in order to build an online following, but the problem was that Lani wasn’t a doctor at all, he just posed as one.

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A Venezuelan man was recently arrested for allegedly implanting plastic lollipop sticks under the skin of dozens of people and tricking them into thinking that they were advanced contraceptive devices.

38-year-old Jose Daniel Lopez stands accused of tricking at least 25 women into paying him to implant simple lollipop sticks under their skin as contraceptives, thus causing some of them to become pregnant. Lopez, who had no medical qualifications, worked in health centers in La Victoria and Maracay, Venezuela, after falsifying his medical degree. He did have some notion of medical procedures, as he performed the subdermal implants himself, claiming they were “Implanon” an actual contraceptive procedure that involves small plastic rods being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.

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A 31-year-old woman was recently sentenced to 2 years in prison for impersonating a physician and then an ophthalmologist for years without any medical training.

It all started in 2018, when Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from Meaux, in northern France, decided to try her luck as a physician, without undergoing any medical training. Sonia had a bachelor’s degree in real estate management, but she didn’t let that get in the way of attaining a lucrative job as a general physician. The woman forged a bunch of diplomas from the Faculty of Strasbourg and a false certificate on the board of the Order of Physicians, and not only got the job, but saw patients for three years before anyone noticed she had no business being a doctor.

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At just 23-years-old, Dr. Veeragandham Teja had already worked in 16 private hospitals, conducted several medical camps and had volunteered with Bengaluru police and local migrant workers during the pandemic. Not a bad record for any doctor, let alone a 5th grade dropout with no medical education and little training…

Veeragandham Teja had been working as a doctor for over four years when his luck finally came to an end. It was a double whammy that got him in the end: his second wife filed mental and physical harassment against him, and he made the mistake of making a recommendation to police to cancel a person’s rowdy sheet (criminal record), only to then be spotted driving that person’s registered SUV. All it took was a bit of digging and police uncovered a web of lies going back over a decade, false degrees and certificates and several aliases. Their conclusion was that Teja’s career and pretty much all of his life, for that matter, was a fabrication…

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A 19-year-old man with no medical training whatsoever managed to fool the staff at one of the most prestigious medical institutions in India into thinking that he was a doctor just by hanging out with real doctors and wearing a face mask and stethoscope.

No one knows exactly why Adnan Khurram decided to impersonate a junior resident at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, but he somehow managed to do it for five months. Despite lacking any medical training or qualifications, and not showing up on the institute’s payroll, the 19-year-old had become quite involved in hospital politics, participated in various events there and even posed as Dr. Adnan Khurram on Instagram.

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