A man posed as a doctor for five years aboard Aida cruise ships before being caught last week. (Photo: iStock)

A fake doctor has been exposed on the Aida cruise line — where he’d been treating passengers and crew members for five years.

The 40-year-old man, whose name has not yet been released, was caught in Berlin recently after flying in from Miami. The understanding seems to be that he is a trained nurse but had falsified a doctor’s license and claimed to be a specialist in anesthesia and intensive care. Cruise Critic reports that a spokesperson for the Berlin prosecutor’s offices said the man had given medical attention to “several hundred” passengers and crew.

Aida cruises received a tip about the elaborate con at the end of November and contacted police. (Photo: Aida Cruises/Facebook)



Aida Cruises (which is part of the Carnival group and which caters to a German-speaking audience) received a tip about the deception at the end of November and contacted the Berlin police. “Only then we learned that investigations in this case have been going on for months already,” Hansjörg Kunze, Aida’s vice president of communication and sustainability, told the Daily Mail.

The con seems to have been elaborately planned: The man had provided references, which the cruise line checked out, and managed to keep up the charade for five years.

Details are still being investigated, and the names of the ships he worked on are still under wraps.

