📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
A former security guard performing "colon cleansing" in Prato, two GPs arrested in Locri for selling sick notes: Italy's 2025 cases on both sides of the register
Italy's false-doctor history, from a 1984 forgery to a 2023 hospital case, is recorded elsewhere on this site. The cases of 2025 add two more, one from each side of the register.
According to La Nazione, in December 2025 a 53-year-old former security guard was arrested in Prato for practising medicine illegally. He had been performing an invasive procedure, colonic cleansing, on clients without any professional qualification, and the newspaper reported that three patients said they had been abused during the procedures; his wife was also under investigation. In September 2025, ANSA and the Gazzetta di Parma reported that the Guardia di Finanza had arrested two general practitioners in Locri, in Calabria, accused of issuing false sickness certificates.
The Prato man was never a doctor; the Locri doctors were real ones. What unites the cases is the document. The first sold a treatment that only a licensed practitioner may give, on the strength of looking like one. The second sold a certificate that only a licensed practitioner may sign, on the strength of being one. Italy's Order of Physicians register, FNOMCeO, would have shown the first to be absent and the second to be present; it would not, on its own, have shown that the second were committing a crime. That is why the register records disciplinary action as well as names.
Italy admits international students to English-language medical programmes through a national admission test, and that route is the subject of agents' claims, recorded on this site, of "admission without the exam". The Prato and Locri cases are a reminder of what the eventual licence actually is: a name on the Order's register, with a clean record attached. No agent can sell that, and no clinic in a back street can confer it. Check the register for any practitioner and, when you are the practitioner, keep your own entry clean.
Were you affected by this case, or something like it? Report it with your own evidence, or tell your story — first-person accounts are what stop the next family.
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.