Another scam has been uncovered by the Department of Justice. Federal investigators have dismantled a years-long South Florida diploma-mill network that sold thousands of fraudulent nursing credentials, allowing people who skipped required coursework and clinical training to sit for licensing exams and take jobs in hospitals and clinics across the country.
The investigation, known as Operation Nightingale, returned to the spotlight this week after a widely shared social media post described a $250 million scheme operating through Haitian immigrant networks, according to Just The News. Court records and Justice Department announcements describe a sprawling operation involving several now-closed for-profit nursing schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties, recruiters who steered paying customers to the schools and buyers who received diplomas and transcripts for education they had not completed.
Many of those buyers later passed the national nursing examination and obtained licenses.
The first major wave of federal charges came in 2023, when prosecutors targeted more than two dozen defendants connected to schools including Siena College of Health, Palm Beach School of Nursing and Sacred Heart International Institute. Those programs accounted for more than 7,600 fraudulent diplomas, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. Later phases of the investigation brought charges involving additional defendants and schools.
One of the largest cases involved Carleen Noreus, who operated two Carleen Home Health schools in Plantation and West Palm Beach. Federal prosecutors said Noreus was responsible for 2,956 fraudulent diplomas issued between 2018 and 2025. About 2,274 recipients subsequently passed board examinations and became licensed. Noreus pleaded guilty during her trial in June and was sentenced this week to 87 months in federal prison.
Recent television and online reports have placed the broader operation at roughly 15,000 purchased credentials and $250 million in payments. Those figures exceed totals contained in earlier Justice Department charging documents and appear to encompass multiple schools and later stages of the investigation. Buyers generally paid five-figure sums for documents making it appear they had completed nursing programs they had never attended.
The federal prosecutions have largely targeted school operators, recruiters and others who created and sold the fraudulent credentials rather than the people who purchased them. Officials have said purchasing a fake diploma does not itself constitute a federal offense in the same way manufacturing and selling the fraudulent documents does.
News reports and comments from South Florida prosecutors have also noted that many customers came from the region’s Haitian-American community, including licensed practical nurses seeking a faster route to registered-nurse credentials. Several school operators and recruiters charged in the cases also came from that community. Federal charging documents, however, focus on the alleged wire fraud and efforts to circumvent nursing education requirements rather than defendants’ or customers’ immigration status.
State nursing boards have since closed the implicated schools and reviewed licenses obtained using the fraudulent credentials. The larger concern for regulators is what happened after some buyers received those licenses: People who had not completed required clinical training were able to work in hospitals, nursing homes and home-health agencies across multiple states.
In the Noreus case, prosecutors alleged that a nurse who obtained fraudulent credentials through her schools later contributed to a patient’s death at a St. Louis hospital in 2023. The allegation marked the first time the government publicly connected a specific patient death to the diploma scheme. Licensing boards have warned employers and applicants that diplomas from the implicated Florida programs do not satisfy nursing education requirements.
Operation Nightingale has become one of the largest nursing-education fraud investigations in recent U.S. history, producing dozens of convictions, shuttered schools and millions of dollars in potential forfeitures. The investigation has also left regulators with a more difficult problem: determining how many people who obtained nursing licenses through fraudulent credentials are still treating patients.
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