📰 From the news · Fake admission / seat promise
A 10,000-yuan deposit, and the next day a 'surgeon with three years' practice' on the National Health Commission website: Huainan's doctor-certificate sellers, 2026
China's National Health Commission runs a public online query system for licensed physicians, which patients, employers and foreign students at Chinese medical universities are told to rely on. In 2026 a newspaper investigation showed that a name could be bought onto it within a day.
According to Huaxi Metropolis Daily, whose Cover News investigation was carried by China News Service on 26 June 2026, reporters posing as people with no medical education, experience or work record spent about a month contacting six 'medical exam training' agencies in Shaanxi, Sichuan and Anhui. Packages ranged from 21,800 to 350,000 yuan. One Xi'an firm priced a no-study, no-exam 'record supplement' route at 39,800 yuan; another offered a college diploma for 20,000 yuan and a bachelor's for 60,000; Huainan Jiacheng Education asked for 10,000 yuan down against 168,000 yuan paid in stages. The reporter paid the Huainan deposit in June and the next day received a screenshot of the commission's website showing the reporter registered as a surgeon at a Shanghai outpatient department with, the paper said, two to three years of practice. It was still there on 25 June. Reporters photographed 23 sets of other people's certificates and handed their findings to authorities in Xi'an, Huainan and Mianyang that day.
The Beijing News, in an editorial on 7 July 2026, described the mechanism: 'ghost enrolment', in which an applicant passes an entrance exam, never attends and receives a full-time medical junior-college diploma after three years; and 'certificate borrowing', in which agencies find similar records on the national student database and copy or take over them. It put the cost at a little over 100,000 yuan at most, said most buyers worked in dental and medical-aesthetic clinics, and reported that the National Health Commission had opened an investigation. On 13 October 2026 Cover News reported that police had confirmed Jiacheng Education was a counterfeit-certificate ring spanning two provinces, had found at least one buyer who practised on a fake certificate, and had sent those involved to the procuratorate for prosecution. Livestream sales pitches from other agencies were still running on 12 October, it said.
The check that failed was the register itself. The sellers were not forging a card; they were inserting diplomas and work histories upstream, through gaps in vocational-school records and local health-department oversight, so that the official database accepted the entry.
For students the lesson is to verify in more than one place. Confirm a doctor or a qualification with the regulator and the institution, not from a single screenshot, and treat any agent who promises a licence, a seat or a registration 'without exams' as selling a crime, not a shortcut. A register is only as strong as the records fed into it.
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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.