7,600 People, Including Many Immigrants, Obtained Fake Nursing Diplomas in Florida-Based Scheme

A nurse prepares a dose of the Sinopharm Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine at the Mount Elizabe
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Katherine Hamilton

Twenty-five people are facing criminal charges in a scheme out of Southern Florida that allegedly sold 7,600 fake nursing diplomas for more than $100 million, Forbes reported on Tuesday.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed the investigation in late January, which the agency dubbed “Operation Nightingale.” The DOJ revealed how three now-defunct Florida nursing schools — Siena College, Palm Beach School of Nursing and Sacred Heart International Institute — enabled “untrained individuals,” including immigrants, “to sit for the national nursing board exams and at least 2,800 of them passed,” the report states. 

“The unsettling result: fake nurses were working everywhere from Texas nursing homes to a New Jersey assisted living facility to a New York agency caring for homebound pediatric patients. The Veterans Administration has had to fire 89 phony-degreed nurses involved in direct patient care as a result of what the Feds call “Operation Nightingale.’’ (The VA says it has uncovered no actual patient harm),” according to the report.

“State licensing boards are also scrambling—Delaware has annulled 26 licenses of working nurses, Georgia has asked 22 to surrender their licenses, and Washington state is investigating 150 applicants with fraudulent credentials,” the report continues. 

The 7,600 participants in the scheme reportedly included many immigrants, including Haitians. Hahnah Williams, an Atlanta-base attorney representing several nurses involved in the scam, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitutional her clients are innocent in the scheme.

“My clients are compassionate, hardworking immigrants who came to this country in pursuit of a better life. They legitimately obtained their education from accredited nursing schools and subsequently passed their licensing exams,” Williams said in a statement.

The scheme took place between 2016 and 2021, with nursing candidates allegedly paying as much as $15,000 for fake diplomas, officials said. Each of the 25 people facing charges in the scheme face up to 20 years in prison.

Omar Perez Aybar, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told ABC News that the nursing diploma cash mill “is probably one of the most brazen schemes” he has seen. 

Aybar told the outlet that investigating agents spent weeks sifting through more than 10,000 records from nursing schools during the investigation.

“As we started to poke through them we noticed there were no real courses the individuals took — it was simply a cash mill,” he said, adding that for those who allegedly participated, “it was worth the investment, or the risk.” 

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Markenzy Lapointe said the scheme enabled alleged participants “to avoid hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of clinical training — countless hours getting that experience.”

“Not only is this a public safety concern, it also tarnishes the reputation of nurses who actually complete the demanding clinical and course work required to obtain their professional licenses and employment,” Lapointe said in an official statement, noting that “a fraud scheme like this erodes public trust in our health care system.”

“The alleged selling and purchasing of nursing diplomas and transcripts to willing but unqualified individuals is a crime that potentially endangers the health and safety of patients and insults the honorable profession of nursing,” Aybar said in a statement. “In coordination with our law enforcement partners, HHS-OIG continues to aggressively investigate bad actors who so brazenly disregard the well-being of others in order to enrich themselves fraudulently.”

Officials did tell ABC News that they had “not learned of, nor uncovered any evidence of patient harm stemming from these individuals potentially providing services to patients” but said the potential for harm is of great concern.

Forbes writers Emma Whitford and Janet Novack quoted from a book entitled Fake Degrees and Fraudulent Credentials in Higher Education, which argues that academic integrity scholars have not paid enough attention to the prevalence of fake degrees. The three Canadian academics who edited the book gained insight from Allen Ezell, a retired FBI agent “who holds 65 degrees, only one of them legitimate — an associate’s degree in accounting from Strayer University.” Ezell spent the last 11 years of his career at the FBI running Operation Diploma Scam and eventually retired to research, write, and lecture on diploma mills. 

“While no one can really know the size of the market, Ezell estimates that phony degree mills now do $7 billion a year in sales worldwide, with much of that market in the United States and the Middle East, particularly the Gulf region,” according to the report. “That’s exploded from $1 billion in 2004, he figures, thanks to the internet, the push to educate more adults online and the Covid-19 era shift to online classes for college-aged students too.”

The report continues: 

The U.S. has long been a hotbed for fake diplomas because of its emphasis on educational degrees, its decentralized system for accrediting schools and its relatively free market in education, the book asserts. House and Senate committees have held hearings on the problem for decades—but those haven’t actually led to any legislative fixes.

The United States does not explicitly outlaw advertising, issuing, or holding fake degrees, but prosecutors try to go after schemes using criminal statutes including wire and mail fraud, according to the report.

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