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69 diplomas, 28 equivalency certificates, 47 blank forms and 8 institutional stamps: the Laayoune forgery ring sold on Facebook, and the Meknes seller who followed a year later
Morocco's forged-diploma trade has moved online, and in 2025 and 2026 the police caught two of its retailers.
According to Hespress, police in Laayoune arrested a man in April 2025 suspected of producing and selling forged academic diplomas and vocational-training certificates, after an investigation triggered by advertisements on social media. A search of his premises recovered 69 fake diplomas, 28 forged equivalency certificates for vocational credentials, 47 blank diploma application forms and eight counterfeit stamps of various training institutes, together with a bank card and 16 money-transfer receipts that police linked to sales. A second suspect was identified and sought. Fès News reported the same seizure with photographs of the documents and the Facebook listings.
In July 2026, Morocco World News reported that police in Meknes arrested a 25-year-old over forged diplomas offered for sale online, and that the investigation was continuing. The same year, University World News reported arrests after a probe confirmed a master's-degree scam at a public university, part of a wider series of investigations into how Moroccan degrees are awarded.
The documents in the Laayoune haul were not medical degrees. They were the layer underneath: the school-leaving and vocational certificates, and above all the equivalency certificates, that an applicant to a foreign programme or a licensing body is asked to produce. A forged "equivalence" is how a non-existent qualification is laundered into a real application.
If you are applying to a medical school abroad from Morocco, or anywhere, the equivalency step is where the agents concentrate their offers, because it is slow and the student is anxious. Equivalence is issued by the ministry, never by a Facebook seller or an agent "with a contact inside", and a school that accepts a forged one will, when it is discovered, expel the student and keep the fees.
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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.