His own photo on another doctor's licence, four years as the only general practitioner at a Daegu hospital: the impostor that an insurance-claims probe, not a medical check, exposed

South Korea is one of the harder countries in which to practise medicine on a foreign degree; the single seat that Inha University's medical school keeps for foreign-educated applicants is recorded elsewhere on this site. A tight licensing system is only as good as the checks hospitals and insurers run. A case announced in Daegu in April 2025 shows how somebody else's licence carried an unqualified man through four years of patient care, and possibly a decade before that.

According to TWIG24 and Yonhap News TV, Daegu Seongseo Police Station announced on 18 April 2025 that a man in his 60s had been sent to prosecutors in custody on charges of fraud and of violating the Special Act on Health Crime Control. Police said he had forged a doctor's licence and, as a salaried doctor, treated patients at a hospital in Dalseo-gu, Daegu, from 2021 to 2024. News1 reported that he composited his own photograph onto another person's doctor's licence; the charges include forgery of official documents. Police acted on a tip, TWIG24 reported, and were examining whether the hospital or the real licence holder knew.

SBS and the Daegu broadcaster TBC added detail on 1 May 2025. The man had been the only general practitioner at a Korean-medicine hospital in Daegu from 2021 to December 2024. The doctor whose details he used, a former colleague, was on leave, so the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service saw nothing unusual. The scheme came to light only because police were investigating the hospital over improper insurance claims. His employment records claimed a neurosurgery programme at a prestigious medical school and directorships of two hospitals. Police suspect the deception lasted more than ten years, including a stint at a Daegu nursing hospital in 2017 and 2018.

The licence was genuine, so the number and name matched a real doctor. What appears to have failed was the human step: nobody compared the face on the certificate with the person it was issued to, and as the only general practitioner he had no colleague to notice gaps in his knowledge. The fraud surfaced from a billing investigation, not from anyone questioning his medicine.

For a student weighing medicine abroad, the lesson is direct. A licence or a university certificate proves only that such a document exists, not that the person showing it is the person it was issued to. Verify every credential with the issuing regulator or institution, contacting them yourself rather than through a number the agent supplies, and confirm that the name, the photograph and the person in front of you match. Pay fees to the institution's own account, never to an intermediary, and keep your originals in your own hands.