A medical licence for US$600 in Mexico City's printing district: the fake-credential trade that reached the national blood-transfusion centre

Mexico has a large, legitimate medical-education system that trains thousands of foreign students, particularly from the United States. It also has a long-running market in counterfeit professional documents, and in 2012 that market reached the top of the public health system.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, fake college diplomas and professional licences — the government-issued "cédula profesional" required to practise medicine, law or engineering — could be bought in Mexico for as little as US$600. The trade's centre was Santo Domingo Plaza, the historic heart of Mexico City's printing industry, where forged documents were produced to order. In August 2012, 22 federal health officials were arrested after their medical and psychology licences turned out to be counterfeit. They included, according to the report, the technical director of the National Center for Blood Transfusions and the chief medical officer of the National Commission for Medical Arbitration — the body that adjudicates complaints against doctors. The Secretariat of Public Education responded with tighter verification of professional licences.

This is a credential-fraud case rather than an admission scam, and it belongs on this site for the reason the Iraq case does: it shows what "recognition" is worth when the documents that carry it can be printed. A licence number that a hospital, an employer or a foreign regulator can look up in a live government database is worth something; a paper certificate, however official it looks, is worth exactly what it cost to print.

For students the lesson cuts two ways. First, when you are told that a school, an agent or a "contact" can arrange a licence, a registration or a professional card — anywhere in the world — you are being offered a forgery, and forgeries are discovered in audits years later, when the holder has the most to lose. Second, when you are choosing a foreign programme, ask how its graduates are verified at home: Mexico now checks cédulas against a national register, the United States runs every foreign credential through ECFMG's primary-source verification, and India's NMC verifies foreign degrees through the issuing university. A programme whose graduates cannot be verified at the source is a programme whose degree will one day be questioned.

Mexico's public and private medical schools remain a genuine option, especially for students from the Americas; the risk is not the schools but the paper economy around professional credentials. Deal only with institutions and regulators directly, and treat any shortcut to a licence as the crime it is.