A Brazilian doctor faces charges of fraud after being caught on camera using silicone fingers to sign in for work for absent colleagues, police say.

Thaune Nunes Ferreira, 29, was arrested on Sunday for using prosthetic fingers to fool the biometric employee attendance device used at the hospital where she works near Sao Paulo.

She is accused of covering up the absence of six colleagues…

The doctor was arrested by the local police following a two-week investigation in the town of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, and was released on Sunday.

Police said she had six silicone fingers with her at the time of her arrest, three of which have already been identified as bearing the fingerprints of co-workers…

Brazil’s ministry of health has said it will launch an inquiry of its own into the local hospital.

The town’s mayor, Acir Fillo says that the police investigation showed that some 300 public employees in the town, whom he described as “an army of ghosts“, had been receiving pay without going to work.

Wow! A couple of decades ago, this would have been a silly French movie. Now, modern science comes to the aid of phonies on the payroll.