Hey dude...I hope you are for real... 
LONDON : A former taxi driver who passed himself off for years as
an eminent doctor and psychiatrist, making a fortune in fees and
even appearing in court as an expert witness, was jailed for 10
years in Britain on Wednesday.
Barian Baluchi, 43, whose only other experience before turning to
medicine had been as a waiter and in a dry cleaning shop, was told
by Judge Henry Blacksell that the scale of his crime "falls into
new territory".
"You are a practised and out-and-out fraudster and deceiver," he
said, sentencing the Iranian-born immigrant to Britain at Middlesex
Guildhall Crown Court.
The court had heard how Baluchi, who pleaded guilty to 30 sample
charges related to his deception, had reinvented himself in the
late 1990s as "Professor Barian Samuel Baluchi MB ChB MSc PhD,
consultant psychiatrist and neuro psychiatrist".
After buying a PhD from the United States, he adopted the identity
of a genuine doctor whose official registration had lapsed before
persuading officials to change that name to his own.
Once set up, Baluchi earned at least 1.5 million pounds (2.15
million euros, 2.8 million dollars) by treating patients, mainly at
the public expense.
His entirely faked CV claimed he trained at the universities of
Harvard, Columbia, Newcastle, Sussex and Leeds, and had lectured on
both sides of the Atlantic.
The walls of his clinic near Harley Street -- the plush London
address for many of Britain's top doctors -- were "adorned" with
authentic-seeming certificates and even a supposed photograph of
his graduation from one college, prosecutors said.
Baluchi even became a recognised expert witness for British courts,
giving evidence on cases such as whether a man was mentally fit to
stand trial.
It was only "through luck" that none of Baluchi's treatment of
patients resulted in permanent injury, the judge said. - AFP
