$45,000 to $150,000 per family for a Turkish medical seat that did not exist: the admission gangs preying on Iranian students

Iran's medical entrance examination is among the most competitive in the world, Turkish universities are a short flight away and teach medicine in English, and the rial has collapsed. That combination has produced an admission-scam industry that IranWire has documented in a series of reports.

According to IranWire, in December 2023 Turkish authorities arrested a fraud gang of Iranian and Turkish nationals accused of defrauding student applicants of close to $1 million by falsely promising university admissions. The gang, the reporting says, targeted families of students seeking medical programmes in particular and charged between $45,000 and $150,000 per family. The façade was elaborate: forged university documents, fake admission letters and even staged campus tours, so that a visiting family saw a real university building with a "representative" who did not represent it. A separate scheme described in the series lured about 300 students to Istanbul with promises of admission without an entrance examination, collecting at least $22,000 from each family in Iran before the students discovered there was no place for them. Victims quoted in the reports repeated the same phrase — the sellers "seemed very credible" — and the series describes an industry rather than isolated incidents, with Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and Northern Cyprus among the destinations claimed. Those arrested are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

What is distinctive about the Iranian version is the price. Sanctions and currency collapse mean families are paying in dollars they can barely obtain, through informal channels, for a product that leaves no paper trail; a family that has lost $100,000 has often lost a house. The staged campus tour is the other distinctive element, and it is a warning to everyone: physically standing on a real campus with a confident guide is not verification. The university's admissions office, reached through the address on the university's own website, is the only source that can confirm an offer — in Turkey, admission for international students runs through each university's published YÖS or international-quota process, with results on the university's own portal.

Iranian students face a further complication: some countries' regulators, and some Turkish universities, have specific rules or restrictions for Iranian nationals, which sellers exploit by promising to "handle" them. Anything that requires an intermediary to handle the rules rather than you meeting them is the sign to stop. The universal defence applies here in its starkest form — never pay for a seat you have not personally confirmed with the institution — because in this market there is no refund and no court that will get the dollars back.