📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
More than a thousand patients and a seven-year sentence: Brigitte Cleroux, the fake nurse who worked in two provinces on falsified credentials
Canada's nursing regulators run public registers and hospitals are required to verify staff against them. In 2024 a court sentenced a woman who had worked around both for years.
According to Global News and CBC, Brigitte Cleroux was sentenced in December 2024 to seven years in prison for impersonating a nurse in British Columbia and Ontario, having treated more than a thousand patients on falsified nursing credentials. CBC reported that she worked at B.C. Women's Hospital in Vancouver from June 2020 until June 2021, when she was dismissed over her false credentials, and that her work there involved roughly 1,150 patients; charges included assault with a weapon and criminal negligence causing bodily harm, for administering medications and injections to patients who did not know she was unqualified. Police described her as having a long history of impersonation. Ontario inspection documents obtained by CBC showed that long-term-care homes and a staffing agency had not properly checked her credentials before she worked there. Other Canadian cases in the same period included a Kingston woman sentenced to house arrest after treating about 200 patients on a forged degree and a doctored screenshot of the regulator's website, and a Toronto woman charged with using another nurse's name and credentials to obtain jobs in care homes.
The doctored screenshot is the detail to keep. A regulator's website is the right place to verify a licence, and a picture of that website is worthless, because it can be edited. The homes that accepted the screenshot were doing verification in form and not in substance.
Students meet the same substitution constantly: a scan of an accreditation certificate on an agent's laptop, a screenshot of a "World Directory listing", a PDF of a "recognition letter" from a regulator. None of them is a check. The check is your own visit to the regulator's site, or your own letter to it, and the Cleroux case is what a year of skipping that step cost 1,150 patients.
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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.