Bellevue, WA – 6 individuals are under investigation for fraud for unlawfully obtaining and holding massage therapy licenses. The Bellevue police believe that these 6 people gave false information on their massage therapist practitioner applications. The investigation has uncovered that a counterfeit Chinese school was also used on the application.
The investigation uncovered that the individuals involved were either not in China during the times they indicated on their applications in order to receive the training, or that they were there for an insufficient number of hours to have completed the training satisfactorily.
The Belelvue, WA police are continuing this investigation which is suspected to lead to the discover of similar activity by others in the area.
—
This is very interesting. The source article did not indicate if these individuals were from the same massage therapy office. If they were not, I would believe that there is a good possibility that others may be committing this same crime. In addition to being interesting, this is also quite scary. Imagine going to see a healthcare professional for help with a condition or injury only to discover that that individual was not trained in massage. One question I have is that wouldn’t this open these individuals up to legal action by any and all of the clients that were under their care? Reimbursement / damages could be sought I would think.
After a re-read of the article for completeness I noticed that there was no indication that these individuals actually received licenses. It merely states that the information they provided on their applications was fraudulent. This would indicate that they were not practicing under a license, if they were practicing at all. This re-read gives me more hope for the system. It appears, according to the article at least, that the system worked in discovering these fraudulent activities.
This leads me to a nice tip for anyone considering a new massage therapist. It is state law for the massage therapist to post their license number on their advertisements. This includes websites. Melissa D’Haene’s massage therapy license number is posted within the sidebar of every page of this site. It is: MA00023939. To verify that it is valid, you can visit: https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/providercredentialsearch/SearchCriteria.aspx and perform a search.