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Arizona man sentenced to prison for posing as a psychologist and treating patients

Scott Keeling
Arizona Department of Corrections
Scott Keeling

An Arizona man is heading to prison for posing as a psychologist.

Scott Keeling was sentenced last week to a year-and-a-half in prison after the Arizona attorney general charged him with an illegal scheme to defraud the state’s Medicaid program for millions.

The attorney general said he used a forged college degree from UCLA to pretend he was a licensed psychologist. He treated patients and even had a license plate that said DR-PSYCH. And he’s not the only one.

Anne Ryman, a reporter on ABC15’s investigative team, has been uncovering cases of unlicensed health care imposters and joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning there, Anne.

ANNE RYMAN: Good morning.

GILGER: Thanks for coming in. Let's start with Scott Keeling and this case and what the AG says he did. What were the charges?

RYMAN: So basically he's accused of fraudulent schemes and essentially what it's alleged that he did is he was using the state's Medicaid system, and he was billing through it and he did not have a code or permission to do so.

GILGER: So he managed to build the state's Medicaid program for a whole lot of money. How much?

RYMAN: The AG believes it's in excess of $3 million.

GILGER: How much of this had to do with the fact that he was calling himself a psychologist, said he had a doctorate, etc.

RYMAN: They believe quite a, quite a bit, you know, it was a very big reason that he did this. He basically, he started this business in 2023, and many people went to work for him at his previous business. For years they thought that he was actually a psychologist and that he had a degree from UCLA and so they were as surprised as anyone else when the criminal charges were announced to find out that this man that they had known for years was not a psychologist and did not have a degree.

GILGER: Right. So this all came to light in a really interesting way. I want you to tell us about it was because of a child custody case that he was involved in. Tell us about that.

RYMAN: Yes, exactly. It was actually a father who uncovered this. It was a child custody case and the father, as part of the court case, they went to court and there was these court documents that were filed. And on the court documents was a document from Dr. Scott Keeling, a psychologist who said he had seen the children and in his professional opinion and they were better off with the guardian than they were with the father.

And the father immediately became suspicious and he thought, Who is this Scott Keeling? He began investigating. He looked into it. He found that he couldn't find him licensed as a psychologist. He checked with the psychology board. They had no record of him. He even at one point hired a private investigator to kind of dig deeper on it.

And when he was pretty confident that this guy was not a psychologist, he contacted the attorney general. He contacted the Phoenix Police Department. He contacted the psychology board. He also called me at the time. And so we all started our own kind of independent investigations, and we all came to the same conclusion, which is we could find no record of this man being licensed in Arizona.

GILGER: Did UCLA have a record of him having graduated there as his diploma would have made you think?

RYMAN: No, not at all. In fact, you know, they told the attorney general that the document was an outright forgery.

GILGER: So talk about the state psychology board and its role here. Like how did they respond to this? What did they do?

RYMAN: So they actually investigated it and they called him before the board where according to the, you know, the minutes I was listening to the audio of it, and he told them that he was in fact a psychologist. They could find no record of it and so they issued him what's called a cease and desist, which is basically you're not a psychologist, you have to stop portraying yourself as one.

At the same time, the attorney general was conducting its own investigation, and the attorney general is the one that actually then came in and filed the criminal charges against him, OK.

GILGER: Will any of his former patients, I wonder, like, find out now at this point that they were treated by someone who was not in fact a psychologist?

RYMAN: Well, they're aware of it because what happened is access, the state's Medicaid system, you know, basically shut down his office because he was not able to operate it anymore. And so the patients were all aware they abruptly lost their treatment. So they had to find treatment elsewhere. Furthermore, many of his employees received maybe a day's notice that they were all of a sudden out of work.

GILGER: You spoke with a few of them like you mentioned. What has Keeling had to say about all this? He maintains his innocence.

RYMAN: So he has not said much if anything. As part of his sentencing, they had to prepare this pre-sentencing report, but that was actually sealed by the judge because there was sensitive information in that. So we don't know what Keeling said to the judge. You know, often these pre-sentencing reports will give background on the person and talk about their childhood and why they may have gone the route that they did. And so we don't know.

He did make one statement in court that he believed this arrangement that he had was legal because he had an attorney look it over, but the attorney general is not buying that argument. They're saying there's there, they said if had the case gone to trial, there's plenty of evidence that would emerge that shows that he knew that this was an illegal arrangement.

GILGER: Interesting. OK, so this is not the only case like this that you have uncovered in recent years, right? Like what are, what are, what other kinds of cases of unlicensed health care kind of practitioners have you found?

RYMAN: So the most recent one comes to mind are are dentists. They're sometimes dentists who are, they might have some training, you know, maybe like hygienist training. I recently covered one where there was a woman who had some sort of dental training in another country and she was here advertising as as doing dental work doing fillings for a sharp reduction, a $100 fillings, right? Which sounds great until you realize maybe that person didn't have the correct training for it. And so she was actually charged by the attorney general.

So sometimes you get the people that are out and outright, they don't have the degree at all, and then often you also get the person who may have been trained a little bit elsewhere and they're coming to air and advertising services like, you know, it happens with massage therapy. I was recently at a massage board meeting where they were issuing three cease and desists to people who were portraying themselves as massage therapists when in fact they were not.

GILGER: And they can cause harm when these kinds of professionals are pretending they're professionals licensed and trained, especially for something like dentistry, and we've seen that harm play out, it sounds like.

RYMAN: Definitely. A lot of the health professions that are regulated and licensed, you need quite a bit of school and training, college to get that degree. And you know, the danger there is that, you know, if you're being treated by somebody who is not in fact has the experience or the knowledge to do it, you could end up with great harm to people.

GILGER: Yeah, yeah. The AG says cases like these, these kind of medical imposter cases are on the rise too.

RYMAN: Yes, and I think that the big thing to underscore, I think, here is the importance of checking any medical professional you might have in your life or your children's lives or your parents' lives. You can easily go to the board that regulates them, and you can check them out, not only check them out to see if they have a license but you can also look back five years of their disciplinary history and see if they've been in trouble with the regulatory board, and that can be a red flag if, if, you know, the person that you're dealing with has a number of problems with the regulatory board.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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