ON BIG SCALE

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 91, 17 April 1923, Page 7

ON BIG SCALE

FRENCH DOCTORS' WAR FRAUDS

PHANTOM PATIENTS TREATED

TWENTY-TWO MILLION FRANCS INVOLVED.

(UNIIHD PRESS ASSOCIATION.—COPYRIGHT.) (AUSTRALIAN . NEW ZEALAND CABLE ASSOCIATION.) PARIS, 16th April. The frauds at Marseilles will prove one of the greatest post-war scandals. The investigations show the ever-widen-ing extent of the frauds, the high professional standing of the accused adding to the public excitement. It is now estimated that the State has been defrauded of at least twenty-two million francs.

The affair -was discovered through, a trifling clerical error of a clerk -who received from a, body claiming to represent disabled soldiers a request for a medical coupon book in the name of one of its members. Instead of sending the coupons to the society the clerk sent the book to the soldier's private address, with a request that he would acknowledge its receipt. The soldier replied that he had never asked for the coupons, and had never been ill.

It was then found that many members of the society had been receiving, medical attention when dead for some time, while the living members had an abnormal record of ill-health. Many, when questioned, denied that they had ever been ill, or .even knew of the existence of the society, which apparently recruited members by merely putting their names on the register. Its agents accosted ex-soldiers at veterans' meetings and thus got enough information to fill up the Government papers. It has now been found that three societies have been, working this plan, and sharing the profits with certain doctors and chemists. Often ex-soldiers were given tubes of tooth paste and boxes of soap_ in exchange' when applying for prescriptions containing seventy or eighty francs' worth of drugs. ■

A message received last week stated that thirty-four doctors had. been arrested in connection with war patient frauds. A number of chemists were also charged with presenting fraudulent vouchers.