A Canadian doctor was scammed out of more than $160,000 after her colleague begged her for financial support with a false cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Meaghan Labine met Monica Kehar in 2018, when the duo was elected to the national body representing the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
But things changed a year later, and by 2020, Labine was down six figures after Kehar asked her for money following her alleged cancer diagnosis.
But the diagnosis turned out to be false and Kehar disappeared. When she resurfaced, she claimed that she had been accepted into a residency program at the University of Calgary and that she had moved to Alberta.
What followed were more requests for funds to cover their living expenses, worth tens of thousands of dollars. “It seemed like no matter how much I lent, it was never enough,” Labine said. CBC.
Monica Kehar is accused of scamming a fellow doctor out of more than C$160,000 after faking a cancer diagnosis and asking for money.
Meaghan Labine says she has yet to get her money back despite winning a default judgment against Kehar in 2022. Kehar has a long history of lying, as evidenced by documents from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba Investigative Committee.
Labine harassed Kehar with contracts she signed, promising to pay her, but the requests did not stop.
Labine told CBC that he continued to lend money to Kehar “because he thought that if he didn’t help her finish medical school, he would never get his money back.”
Things came to a head when Kehar told Labine that he had a job offer from a prominent doctor. However, when Labine confronted that doctor in a meeting, Kehar’s deception was revealed.
“I felt absolutely humiliated,” Labine told the publication. ‘How can I be so stupid to let myself be fooled like this?’
She would later learn that Kehar had not only lied about her illness and her job offer, but that she had also not been accepted into a residency program in Calgary.
In fact, Kehar was expelled from her medical program after a series of infractions that culminated in the fabrication of a serious medical condition.
On November 13, 2020, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba’s Inquiry Committee censured Kehar “as evidence of its disapproval of his conduct.”
According to documents reviewed by DailyMail.com, Kehar registered with the Faculty and enrolled as a first-year family medicine resident at the University of Manitoba in February 2019.
Kehar was expelled from a program in Manitoba after a series of infractions that culminated in him altering documents and fabricating a serious illness.
However, he began participating in an elective in Saskatchewan without the proper license. Kehar would later claim that this error was “inadvertent.”
After being alerted to the problem, Kehar immediately stopped practicing and amended an email he had received from the College before forwarding it to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan.
“This was an apparent attempt by Ms. Kehar to remedy the situation and deflect responsibility for this error from herself to the College,” the document reads.
The College discovered the alteration on February 14, 2019 and reported it to the University of Manitoba the same day.
The discovery led both the school and the university to conduct months-long investigations into Kehar’s behavior.
She denied altering the email, but was placed on paid leave pending further review.
Kehar later contacted the administrators and claimed that he “had received an email from another person who confessed to hacking his account and altering the email dated February 13, 2019.”
Around March 13, Kehar was allowed to return to his resident duties and approximately two days later, the University provided him with a report showing that there was no evidence to support the hacking claims.
The College later learned that Kehar defrauded two medical colleagues of “substantial sums of money” after lying about his state of health “to gain sympathy and support.”
Kehar eventually took responsibility for altering the document, blaming it on “a brief episode of mental exhaustion.” He stated that the decision arose from “fear, stress, exhaustion and nervousness.”
Also in 2019, Kehar registered her French bulldog, Django, as an “emotional support dog” for “stress-related” reasons in Alberta, documents reviewed by DailyMail.com show.
She later admitted that she had altered the offending email and was expelled from the University of Manitoba Family Medicine Program on May 7.
“Her expulsion was based on her admission that she had altered the email in question and the Faculty’s conclusion that Ms. Kehar had been dishonest in connection with other academic events, which she denied,” the document states.
Just a few weeks later, Kehar appealed his expulsion to the University’s Local Disciplinary Committee.
In the appeal, she ‘described her concern that he may have had a serious health condition…and that he underwent a surgical procedure to fix the problem in January 2019.
The document quotes her as saying: “Although I do not feel comfortable discussing this topic, I now understand that it is relevant to this matter and had an impact on me and my actions during this time.”
On May 28, seven days after filing the appeal, Kehar was interviewed by the university investigator. She described “going through a very difficult time” starting in late 2018 and “feeling extremely stressed at the time.”
Kehar also insisted that she had surgery on January 8, but did not provide documentation.
Kehar’s appeal of her expulsion was heard and dismissed in June, but she resubmitted it in July.
In August, Kehar provided the college with a letter purportedly written by the manager of his surgeon’s clinic as proof of the aforementioned surgical procedure.
His lawyers claimed there was no documentation from the hospital because Kehar “did not spend the night.”
Subsequent investigations by College revealed that there was no evidence to support her claim of a diagnosis, nor her claim to have undergone surgery at the hospital she named.
Additionally, an investigation found that the letter she provided had been written much earlier and on a different matter, but Kehar altered it.
The surgeon he identified confirmed with the College that the only procedures he had performed on Kehar were in October 2017 and February 2018, and neither were related to the alleged “serious medical condition.”
The second appeal against his expulsion was heard on January 24, 2020 and dismissed five days later.
The College later learned that Kehar had lied to two colleagues about his personal circumstances, including the state of his health, “to gain sympathy and support.”
Those colleagues lent Kehar “substantial sums of money in response to his requests for assistance on multiple occasions,” according to the document.
Kehar “acknowledged that her conduct was a serious mistake and expressed remorse for her actions in retrospect” and “acknowledged that she has proven herself unfit to practice.” Her expulsion was confirmed.
Despite winning a default judgment against Kehar in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2022, Labine has yet to be reimbursed for the tens of thousands he lost.
He recently filed a lawsuit in British Columbia in an attempt to get his hands on the money.
Kehar has promised to return the money, but Labine has her doubts. “When I pressed her for details or to meet with my lawyer, she didn’t say anything,” she told CBC.