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3,600 blank certificates, 1,300 rubber stamps and a tonne of diploma paper: the Vietnamese forgery workshops that print medical and teaching degrees to order
Vietnam trains a growing number of foreign medical students and sends its own graduates abroad, and its universities issue degrees that are verifiable. The country also has an industrial-scale trade in forged ones, sold openly online, and the police raids show what the workshops look like.
According to Tuoi Tre News, police in Ho Chi Minh City arrested three men, Vu Xuan Nghia, Le Huynh Duy Anh and Cuong Huynh Phat Dat, in February 2021 for running a ring that forged medical and teaching certificates to order. Officers seized 3,600 blank certificates, 110 school profiles, 500 gigabytes of certificate templates on a hard drive, 1,300 rubber stamps, fifty plastic stamps, a seal-making machine, four computers and twelve printers. The ring advertised through its own websites and took orders over social media. Viet Nam News reported a later case in which Hanoi police dismantled a group led by two brothers that forged diplomas from thousands of colleges and universities across the country, seizing a tonne of blank diploma and certificate paper and 1,200 stamps of universities, colleges and vocational schools; university degrees, the paper reported, sold for 500,000 to 700,000 dong, roughly 19 to 27 US dollars. Tuoi Tre reported that forged higher-education diplomas continue to be offered openly on social media. All those arrested are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
The point for a student is the price. A forged degree at twenty dollars is not a product for people who want to be doctors; it is a product for people who want to look like doctors, or teachers, or graduates, to an employer or a patient who will not check. The workshops' stock of school profiles and stamps means the paper can carry any institution's name, including a real medical university's.
Verification therefore cannot stop at the document. Vietnamese universities maintain graduate records and will confirm a degree on request; regulators keep licence registers. A qualification that its issuer cannot find in its own records is, whatever the stamp, one of the 3,600.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.