📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
Five hundred patients, a forged Romanian diploma and two deaths under investigation: the false psychiatrist of Évreux, and the hospitals that hired him
France recognises medical degrees from other European Union countries automatically, which is a convenience for genuine graduates and an opening for anyone with a convincing forgery from an EU member state.
According to What's Up Doc and Le Quotidien du Médecin, Clive Etitie, a 39-year-old Congolese national, worked as a psychiatrist at the hospital in Évreux from 2015 to 2017 on a forged Romanian diploma, treating around five hundred patients. He was convicted on 15 October 2024, sentenced to four and a half years in prison and permanently barred from any medical activity; investigators examined the deaths of two patients in connection with his practice. The reporting described how several hospitals had been taken in by the same man. Egora reported a second case in January 2025: a 54-year-old man, Bruno P., who had forged his cousin's diploma to work at a health centre in central Marseille, adding a false letter of recommendation in the name of a practising general practitioner, was unmasked by a nurse and sentenced to three years' imprisonment, twenty months of them suspended. Other French cases in the same period included a woman who practised as an occupational physician and then in ophthalmology for three and a half years under two doctors' identities, and a man with a lifeguard's certificate who posed for years as an emergency physician at the hospital in Tulle.
The Évreux case is the one for students of European medicine to remember. A Romanian degree is a real, EU-recognised qualification that thousands of foreign students pursue honestly; its recognition in France is automatic. The forger relied on exactly that automaticity, and the hospitals that hired him checked the diploma and not the university.
Whether you are the applicant or the patient, the check is the same: the Order of Physicians' register in France, and the awarding university's records office in Romania. A qualification that both confirm is real. A qualification that only the paper confirms treated five hundred people.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.