The story which surfaced last week about a Dutchman who posed as a doctor and went on to feel up three girls - one of which was 15 - at Mater Dei Hospital sounds like something out of a movie.

And it well might have been. Anyone who has watched the movie Catch me if you can - featuring Leonardo DiCaprio - will have drawn similarities immediately. A young man, posing as a doctor, to satisfy his own needs.

The movie is based on a young man called Frank Abagnale, who had posed as an airline pilot and made hundreds of thousands of dollars by cashing fraudulent cheques. After escaping arrest from an airliner, he retired to Georgia where he passed himself off as a paediatrician. After years of giving the FBI the slip, he was eventually jailed. But the FBI offered him another path, and that was to become a government employee to bust fraud rings. It is a true story.

So, while it might sound incredulous that a 25-year-old Danish tourist managed to convince three girls that he would give them modelling work and in the process take them to Mater Dei and feel them up after giving them an ECG, crazier things have happened.

The story is simple. A Danish man has been up to no good and posed as a doctor (which he claims he is) to seduce girls while on  holiday in Malta. He has a rap sheet that includes 25 convictions in Denmark and a Facebook page has been set up to warn people of his existence, which seems to be unsavoury at the very best.

He told three girls that they would get modelling work and that he needed to give them a medical exam. Somehow, he got them to go to Mater Dei, took them to an empty room and gave them an ECG and felt them up. The initial reaction is to blow one's top and ask how that person ever managed to get past security, etc, etc.

But... The initial reaction overlooks one thing. This young man has been doing this all his adult life and like Abagnale, he got away with it everywhere he went. This is not so much a case of lax security, but of a person who is as cunning as a fox, as sly as a weasel and as manipulative as Frank Abagnale was. His motives might have been different and his primary motive was for women, not for financial gain, but this man would have given anyone the slip.

A review of security procedures is most definitely needed and Mater Dei can learn from this experience. But when the health sector has so many real problems, let us not lose focus. This is not Mater Dei's fault. This is society's fault for being so gullible when people hold positions of trust. It just so happened that he chose Malta and Mater Dei to be the venue for his next caper. It could have been any hospital in the world. The ability of certain people to be so manipulative, confident and brazen is certainly an eye opener. Could it have been prevented? Maybe. But surely, this is the work of a mastermind, not a case of blatant laxness at Mater Dei. The courts let him off with a non-custodial punishment, probably with the hope that the problem would go away. Whether that decision was right or wrong is another matter entirely.