Staff who had not finished grade 12 posing as doctors, a basement exit for inspection days: Da Nang police charge the 'fake doctors' of an international clinic, 2025

Viet Nam licenses doctors through practice certificates, and a clinic's operating licence names the practitioners who are supposed to be on the floor. A recurring abuse is the 'doctor on paper': a licensed physician whose name secures the licence while someone else sees the patients. The Da Nang International General Clinic case shows how far that can go.

According to Tuoi Tre on 15 July 2025, Da Nang police opened a case and charged seven people, including human-resources managers and staff, over deceiving customers at the clinic on Tran Phu street, and detained four of them. The paper reported that some doctors were registered on paper only and rarely attended, that outsiders with no medical certificate or degree, at least one of whom had not finished grade 12, posed as doctors, examined patients and issued medical orders, and that during surprise inspections the fake doctors withdrew through a pre-built exit to the basement while licensed doctors took their place. The government newspaper Chinhphu.vn reported the next day that the clinic, at 180 Tran Phu and run by Da Nang International General Hospital Joint Stock Company, was registered for circumcision, sexual dysfunction and sexually transmitted disease treatment, and that staff invented diagnoses and exaggerated procedure steps and complications to push patients into packages costing 5 to 30 million dong.

The numbers grew with the investigation. The first report put the illegal gains at nearly 376 million dong from 17 customers. Tuoi Tre reported on 6 August 2025 that police now put the takings at nearly 1.3 billion dong from more than 80 victims nationwide, with online consultations advertised at 199,000 to 1 million dong and on-site treatment costing 10 to 50 million dong per service; the city also fined the company 148.5 million dong for six environmental and food-safety violations. On 27 July 2026 the paper reported that the Da Nang People's Procuracy had indicted the defendants and sent the case to the Da Nang People's Court, Area 1, with the company's director Nong Thi Thu and the clinic's director Le Hong Hai among those charged with deceiving customers, the accountant charged with accounting violations over two sets of books that kept revenue off the official records and cost the state more than 3.9 billion dong in tax, and three Chinese nationals wanted. The clinic has closed.

The mechanism, as reported, was a licence held in the name of a doctor who was seldom there, unqualified staff doing the examining and prescribing, and an escape route for inspection days. The paperwork at the entrance could look in order; the problem was that the person in the consulting room was not the person named on it.

The lesson travels. Ask the person treating you for their own practice certificate and compare the name with the licence board at the entrance; if they are different people, leave. Be suspicious of 'international' branding, of packages that grow during the consultation, and of clinics whose paperwork and prices do not match, since in this case prosecutors say two sets of books were kept. In Viet Nam complaints go to the provincial Department of Health, and in this case police asked victims to contact Team 4 of the Da Nang police investigation agency.