📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
More than 200 patients, 568 million pesos and no medical degree: the Bogotá couple charged over a network of "aesthetic clinics", and the 115 similar complaints the medical college says it had already
In September 2026 Colombia's Fiscalía charged two people in Bogotá with running a network of consulting rooms that performed cosmetic surgery on more than 200 people without a single medical qualification between them.
According to El Tiempo, Semana and the Bogotá city government, the two were arrested during searches of a property in the Usaquén district. Prosecutors said the network used several company names and consulting rooms fitted out to look like licensed facilities, and advertised liposuction, laser lipolysis, fat transfer, buttock augmentation, abdominal "marking" and rhinoplasty, mainly through social media and promotional prices. The procedures, prosecutors said, were done without proper asepsis, without a certified anaesthetist and without clinical records. The charges were conspiracy, mass fraud, forgery of public documents, all aggravated, and procedural fraud; both accepted the charges, El Tiempo reported. Fifty-nine identified patients had paid more than 568 million pesos.
The detail that matters most for readers of this site came afterwards. El Tiempo reported that the Colombian Medical College had already filed a complaint about one of the accused before the arrest, and said it had 115 similar cases on file. The regulator knew; the patients did not, because they trusted the consulting room, the uniforms and the Instagram testimonials rather than the register.
A medical degree in Colombia, as everywhere, is a name in a public register (ReTHUS), and a clinic is a licence from the health secretariat, both searchable. The Bogotá network reproduced everything except those two entries. The same holds for a medical school: a campus, a white coat and a video of happy students can be rented. A place on the regulator's recognised list cannot.
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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.