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p(Dentist does this) * p(Dentist gets caught when doing this) = number of police reports on the subject. I'd expect this to be the sort of thing the media would have a ton of fun with, and I don't recall ever seeing a news report on this subject, so I'd assume # of police reports is very low.
Either this is an amazingly easy crime to get away with, or not many dentists do it. By default, I'd favor the latter theory by a wide margin, but I'll concede I'm uneducated on how hard it would be to detect something like this (at a minimum, if another dentist can notice these "starter holes" then simply getting a second opinion would reveal the fraud. The alternate is to assume a national dental conspiracy...)
"Starter holes," really? Think for five minutes. Dental health is invisibly reinforced or ruined by saliva chemistry, which a competent-yet-malicious professional could sabotage in ways most laymen - even a professional investigator such as a police office - would be oblivious to. http://ua.johntynes.com/content_comments.php?id=P3105_0_3_0
I'm not worried about laymen catching it - I'm worried about other dentists noticing. "Second opinion" and all that.
Mostly, I'd assume (but could well be wrong) that the consequences are worse for a dentist than for, say, an auto-mechanic, so there's more incentive for a dentist to be honest.
You mean like this one? I don't personally think many dentists would sabotage your teeth, but there might be some correlation such that the drilling vibration weakens the tooth structure somehow, leading to future cavities. I'll save that research for a time when I have better software and am really bored, though.