A Russian "doctor" treating tourists in Phuket without a licence, and the clinic in Bangkok where a man with a long criminal record was found working as a physician

Thailand's two long-running Bangkok clinic cases, the ten-year and twenty-year impostors, are recorded elsewhere on this site. The cases of 2025 show the same problem in the places foreigners meet it.

According to the Bangkok Post, in June 2025 police in Phuket arrested a 33-year-old Russian woman, named in the report as Viktoria Freimark, for claiming to be a doctor and offering medical treatments on the island without a licence. She admitted that she was not a doctor and that she had administered treatments several times. Later in 2025, the Post reported the arrest at a Bangkok clinic of a "doctor" with a long criminal record, and The Thaiger reported a man arrested at a clinic in Samut Prakan, in the act of giving a patient an injection, for practising without a licence.

Phuket has a large population of Russian-speaking residents and visitors, many of whom prefer a practitioner who speaks their language and are unlikely to check the Thai Medical Council's register, which is in Thai. A foreign "doctor" serving a foreign community is a structural weak point in any country, and the same is true of the foreign "education consultant" serving students from his own country abroad: trusted because of the language, unchecked because of it.

Thailand's medical council register is public, and foreign doctors must hold a Thai licence to practise, whatever their qualifications at home. For students from Russia, Central Asia or anywhere else who travel for medical education, the Phuket case has a direct application. The agent or "senior" from your own community, in the destination country, who offers to arrange admission, accommodation and a transfer, is the Phuket doctor in another trade. Check them against the university and the regulator, in the destination country's own records, exactly as you would check a stranger.