A Greek physiotherapist and his accomplice, a German doctor, scammed multiple sclerosis patients into stopping their medications because of their “groundbreaking” treatment, fake stem cell injections made of pure water. Five patients have died.
The criminal duet has collected about one million euros over the past seven years of its activity. After a lengthy investigation, the Greek “doctor” was charged with manslaughter, aggravated assault, attempted murder and fraud.
A 66-year-old physiotherapist from Athens, who was looking for his potential victims throughout Greece, presented himself as a “neurologist”. The victims visited him in a “doctor’s office” in the village of Kalyvia in southeast Attica.
He is charged with five deaths while other cases, at least 15 in total, are pending as the investigation is reportedly continues.
The 72-year-old doctor from Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany was also charged with the same actions as his Greek accomplice. The Greek accompanied his victims to a German doctor who presented himself as a “geneticist” with his own clinic. In conversation with protothema one of the victims reported that the scammers sold him pills worth 15 euros for 200 euros. “I lost 35,000 euros that he took from me for drugs that were placebo. Imagine that each injection he gave me cost 18,000 euros. The German allegedly brought drugs in liquid nitrogen to impress,” the victim said. – It was like watching a Hollywood movie. Some drugs that he brought from Russia cost 1,000 euros for 5 doses. That is 200 euros apiece. And then we found out that they cost 15 euros.”
The victim said that he was diagnosed in 2009, and he became one of the first victims of criminals. When he suspected fraud, he filed a complaint. “When someone treats you and you start to feel unhappy, then something is wrong,” he said, adding that the study he conducted showed that the German doctor was not who he claimed to be. After filing a complaint, “I started getting threatening calls from people who claimed they were police officers,” the man added.
The profit they are accused of receiving from each desperate patient suffering from an incurable disease amounts to several tens of thousands of euros, and in some cases up to 200,000 euros from only one patient.
Samples of the contents of the vials he allegedly injected were sent for laboratory analysis and found to have absolutely no medicinal properties, as stated in the report.
It is reported that the brother of the deceased victim filed the first complaint about the fake doctor with the police in Thessaloniki in 2021. She was on “fictitious treatment” by criminal “doctors” for about two years, it cost the family 65,000 euros.
The case filed against the fake doctor by the Organized Crime Department of the Hellenic Police was forwarded to the Prosecutor’s Office of First Instance of Thessaloniki, and a criminal case was initiated against him.
Another one in 2022 Greek pseudo-doctor was sentenced to 8 times life imprisonment plus another 50 years in prison for the deaths of cancer patients, including minors, to whom he sold counterfeit medicines for thousands of euros after convincing them to stop treatment. Prescribing drugs based on “folk remedies”, the trickster took thousands of euros from people who trusted him. In one case, a patient paid him 22,000 euros! Of the approximately 100 victims, most suffered from cancer. At the same time, the 47-year-old fraudster prescribed them a diet and instructions for preparing juices and food for 9 meals at a strictly defined time.
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