📰 From the news · Other
Specialist "degrees" bought abroad and presented at home: what the Jordan Medical Council found when it checked, and the regional market that supplies them
Jordan trains large numbers of doctors, exports many of them to the Gulf, and recognises specialist qualifications through the Jordan Medical Council. That council has reported finding doctors on its books whose specialisation was bought.
According to the Jordan Times, the Jordan Medical Council discovered that a number of doctors held fake medical specialisation degrees obtained from foreign countries, and referred the matter for action. The council's finding concerned the postgraduate layer: people who were genuine doctors, with genuine first degrees, and who had acquired a specialist title abroad that the issuing institution could not substantiate. The New Arab separately reported, in 2026, the arrest in Amman of a man accused of impersonating a cosmetic doctor, a case that is about impersonation rather than credentials but shows the same reliance on an unverified title.
The Jordanian finding fits a pattern visible across the Middle East on this site: Kuwait's audits of postgraduate degrees from universities in Pakistan, the Philippines and Jordan; Iraq's tens of thousands of degrees bought through Beirut; Israel's doctors with Armenian diplomas they had never studied for; Saudi Arabia's thousands of health workers with forged degrees. The common supply is a set of institutions, real and fictitious, that will issue a certificate for a fee, and a set of fixers who know which regulators check and which do not.
For a student, the relevance is forward-looking. The degree you earn will be checked not once but every time you cross a border, and the councils of the Gulf in particular have become aggressive verifiers. A school whose certificates fail those checks, because the school is unknown to the verification services, slow to answer, or on a watch list, will cost you a career later even if it costs you nothing now. Choose the institution whose graduates are already being registered where you want to work.
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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.