📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
A fake CV, forged references and a forged practising certificate: the man who worked six months as a respiratory fellow at Middlemore Hospital and saw 81 patients
New Zealand's Medical Council registers every doctor and issues an annual practising certificate, the document a hospital asks for at hiring. In 2023 a court dealt with a man who had forged one.
According to the New Zealand Herald, Yuvaraj Krishnan was sentenced in April 2023 to three years and seven months in prison after posing as a respiratory fellow at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland for six months, during which he saw 81 patients, carried out chest examinations and prescribed medicines. He had obtained the position with a fake curriculum vitae, forged reference letters and a forged practising certificate; the judge described him as having a "Walter Mitty view of life". NZ Skeptics' survey of New Zealand's fraudster doctors places the case in a longer history. In a related story from the other direction, 1News reported in 2025 that Zholia Alemi, who practised as a psychiatrist in Britain for over twenty years on a forged University of Auckland degree, had been ordered to repay close to a million dollars to the UK's National Health Service; her case appears separately on this site.
Middlemore is the instructive one for anyone entering medicine through a hospital job abroad. Krishnan did not forge a degree; he forged the one document a hospital treats as proof that the regulator has already done the checking. The practising certificate is issued by the council and can be verified with the council in minutes, and the case turned on nobody making that call.
The same reliance runs through the admissions market: a "recognition certificate" from a ministry, a "no-objection certificate" from a regulator, an "eligibility certificate" from a medical council. Each is a document that exists, and each is forged precisely because people accept it as the end of the enquiry. Verify it with the body that issued it. A hospital that had done so would have had one fewer respiratory fellow and 81 patients would have seen a doctor.
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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.