A dead doctor's photo on his Facebook profile, a health-centre badge and victims' ID cards found on him: the second impostor caught at Hospital Central de Maputo in three months

Hospital Central de Maputo (HCM) is Mozambique's largest referral hospital, and its emergency department, the Banco de Socorros, is where the city's poorest patients queue. The Ordem dos Médicos registers doctors and the hospital issues its own staff identification, but neither stops a confident stranger from working the queue. In July 2024, three months after one impostor had been caught there, police detained another.

According to Jornal Notícias (22 July 2024), the man was caught on a Friday by a hospital security guard as he tried to recruit yet another victim. On social media he presented himself as "Yeye Smed Jackson", and one of his published photographs showed him in a white coat bearing the logo of the Hospital Militar de Maputo. On him, the newspaper reported, were a health-centre badge, identity cards, voter cards, bank cards and hospital documents presumed to belong to his victims. Integrity Magazine (22 July 2024) gave the date of the arrest as Friday 19 July 2024, inside the HCM grounds, and reported that he ran several Facebook profiles, that one of the photographs he used belonged to a doctor who had already died, and that he was not wearing hospital uniform. Staff and guards watching the surveillance system grew suspicious of his movements; when he saw security approaching he tried to flee and was held until police arrived. A hospital source told the magazine that he attracted patients through social media by offering to speed up or facilitate their care in exchange for money. The magazine reported that the Polícia da República de Moçambique had detained him pending the legal steps to hold him responsible, and that health authorities urged the public to use only official channels to access care.

Both July reports noted that it was not the first such arrest. Jornal Notícias had reported on 10 April 2024 that a 24-year-old was caught in the same Banco de Socorros carrying a stamp, a prescription book and a stethoscope, after staff noticed his poor coordination with the duty team. In November 2024 the newspaper reported that the Kamubukwane district court sentenced Enoque André Mondlane to four years in prison, a fine and 200,000 meticais in compensation to a patient whose condition worsened after he "treated" him.

The mechanism relied on documents that look official but prove nothing: a badge from an unnamed health centre, a borrowed photograph of a real doctor, a coat with a military hospital logo. Victims handed over their own identity and bank cards, which then became tools for recruiting the next patient. What stopped him was not a register check but a guard watching a camera.

For students and families the lesson is that a social-media profile offering to "facilitate" hospital treatment, admission or a specialist appointment for a fee is a warning sign in itself. Deal only with the hospital's own desks, never surrender identity, voter or bank cards to an intermediary, and verify any doctor's name with the Ordem dos Médicos before paying anyone anything.