Thirteen years running an island hospital on fake Rome diplomas, three cancer patients dead under a self-styled specialist: Greece's false doctors, and the villa "clinic" charging €6,000 a treatment

Greece has produced three of the more striking false-doctor cases in Europe, over three decades, and together they map the ways an impostor gets in.

According to the Greek Reporter, a man named Ioannis Kastanis applied to the Ministry of Health in 1999 with fake degrees from "La Sapienza" University of Rome and went on to run the hospital on the island of Skyros for 13 years before the forgery was discovered in 2014, by which time he had gone to ground. The ministry had hired a hospital director on the strength of documents it had not verified with the university.

In June 2020, CNN and Greek City Times reported the arrest in Athens of a 47-year-old man accused of posing as a specialist doctor and deceiving at least 45 people over two years. Police alleged that three cancer patients, two of them aged 14 and 16 and one aged 76, had died after following his treatments instead of conventional care. He had no medical qualification at all.

In September 2026, Greek City Times reported a woman's account of a man presenting himself as a holistic-medicine specialist who ran an illegal clinic in a villa in Attica, charging thousands of euros for treatments including plasma exchange, who claimed a medical degree from Honolulu and told patients that "classical medicine has now died".

The first case is a verification failure at the point of hiring. The second and third are failures of the patient's own check: a man with a confident manner, a theory and a price list, and nobody who asked the Panhellenic Medical Association whether he was on its register. For students, the Skyros case is the one to keep. A foreign degree certificate from a famous university is exactly what a forger produces, because the name does the work. The ministry believed "La Sapienza". It never wrote to Rome.