Forged stamps on medical certificates, a four-man gang printing university degrees: two Muscat cases, and the paperwork a Gulf licence actually rests on

Oman is a smaller Gulf employer of foreign health workers than its neighbours, and its cases are correspondingly smaller, but they show the same two layers of fraud the whole region deals with.

According to Gulf News, the Ministry of Health broke up a racket in the Hamriya area of Muscat in which four Asian expatriates confessed to using forged stamps on medical certificates submitted to the ministry. In a second case, the Royal Oman Police arrested three members of a four-member gang found forging university degree certificates and medical reports, seizing seals, ink, blank medical reports and fake visas.

The first case is the small end: a medical certificate, the fitness or sick-leave paper that stands between a worker and a job or a day off, stamped with a copied seal. The second is the big end: the degree itself, produced to order with the stationery and seals to match, alongside the visas that would get its holder into the country.

Both end at the same place. Oman's Ministry of Health, like Qatar's and Saudi Arabia's, licenses practitioners only after primary-source verification, in which the ministry's verification contractor writes to the university named on the degree and to the licensing body in the home country. A degree from a printing press in Hamriya fails there, and so does a genuine degree from a university that does not answer.

For students, the Omani cases are a reminder of the second failure, which is the one that catches honest people. The question to ask any medical school abroad is not only "is the degree real" but "will your registrar confirm it, promptly, to a Gulf verification service, with the transcript and the dates", because that is the step at which a career in the Gulf is granted or refused. Schools that have graduates working in Oman can show you that it works. Schools that cannot are asking you to find out for them.