Yes. Exaggeration and puffing yourself up, while tacky, is par for the course, and to be honest, it's likely to get good candidates closer to an accurate representation than not, since better people tend to underplay their abilities, often subconsciously (cf. Dunning-Kruger Effect). But falsifying references with fake phone numbers and email addresses, and then actually operating those numbers and emails and impersonating someone else, that's a whole 'nother ballpark and it likely crosses into fraud.
While one can sympathize if they choose to work from the presupposition that our candidate is in the unlikely-but-not-totally-unrealistic circumstance of being capable but "steal bread to eat" desperate, it's a pretty hard sell to expect someone without a pre-existing relationship to excuse that type of behavior when it gets caught out like this.