📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
Thirty years as a "rehabilitation doctor", 764 patients under another physician's number: the Spanish cases of 2024 and the register that catches them
Spain's medical profession is registered through provincial colleges of physicians, each doctor with a number that appears on every prescription. Two cases in 2024 showed how long a person can practise without one, and how a real number can be borrowed.
According to Infobae and Telecinco, the Civil Guard arrested a 56-year-old man in Rincón de la Victoria, Málaga, in early 2024 who had practised as a rehabilitation doctor for more than three decades without any healthcare qualification. The investigation began in January after two people reported that he was offering medical services without being qualified; the Civil Guard estimated that he could have defrauded patients of more than 300,000 euros over the years. One relative told Infobae the man had wrecked her mother's retirement. In May 2024, COPolicial reported, the National Police arrested a man who had practised at a centre in Madrid using another doctor's credentials: 764 patients passed through his consulting room in almost a year, and he issued more than a thousand prescriptions bearing a stamp with another physician's registration number. A third arrest, in September 2024 in Tarancón, Cuenca, involved a man practising irregularly in several towns. Those arrested are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
The Madrid case is the instructive one. A patient who checked the registration number on the prescription would have found a real, licensed doctor. The number was real; the man was not. That is the structure of a great many frauds on this site, in which a genuine registration, licence or accreditation is displayed by someone it does not belong to.
Spain's General Council of Medical Colleges publishes a register that can be searched by name and number together. The check that works is the one that matches both to the person in front of you. It would have ended the Málaga case in 1994 and the Madrid case in the first week.
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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.