A school dropout who operated on dozens of women while posing as a British boob surgeon has been arrested working at a hotel in Italy after five months on the run.
Bogus medic Matteo Politi was sentenced to three years and 10 months behind bars by judges in Bucharest, Romania, for fraud and faking documents.
But after the hearing in March, the fake cosmetic surgeon fled in a bid to dodge jail.
Politi is understood to have first fled to Hong Kong.
But now he has been seized working at a hotel in Venice under the fake name “Luigi” and is in jail awaiting extradition to Romania.
Politi was found guilty of operating on 28 people in five private clinics in Bucharest between March and December 2018.
The ops – performed without a single medical qualification – are said to have earned him tens of thousands of Euros.
The Italian national had adopted the identity of a fake British plastic surgeon named Matthew Mode, the court heard during his trial.
He even ran a social media page under that name, where he posted images of himself performing operations and posed as breast augmentation expert.
According to his fake CV, he had studied at UPMC Shadyside and The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, both in the USA.
He claimed he had worked as a cosmetic surgeon in the UK, Italy, and Spain, but, in reality, he had not even completed his school sixth form.
He had been given a licence to practise by Romanian public health officials after submitting a fake diploma from Kosovo’s University of Prishtina Faculty of Medicine.
Although charged with just 28 cases, Politi is believed to have practised medicine illegally for more than 15 years, seeing hundreds of patients.
Italian media report how he was caught in 2019, when nurses assisting him during an operation became suspicious.
The routine breast implant replacement was supposed to take just an hour.
But fumbling Politi took four hours to complete the simple procedure.
He was already on the run from his home country after a traffic warden complained about the cosmetic procedure he had performed on her in 2010.
After getting off with a suspended sentence for fraud, he had moved to the Romanian capital so he could carry on operating on people.
