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Tk 5 lakh local, Tk 25 lakh foreign, 144 subjects including MBBS: the 72-year-old 'vice-chancellor' of a university that did not exist, arrested in Dhaka's Malibagh
Bangladesh licenses its doctors through the Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council, and no institution may award a degree without University Grants Commission approval. Those gates give a certificate its value, and they are why Dhaka forgers built an imitation university rather than printing one fake diploma at a time.
According to The Daily Star, the Detective Branch of Dhaka Metropolitan Police arrested six men in the Malibagh area of the capital and announced the arrests at a briefing on 7 April 2022. The Business Standard, under the headline 'DB arrests fake vice-chancellor and doctors', said the arrests were made the previous day. The first man was Md Nurul Haque Sarkar alias Sheikh Gani Sarkar, 72, who styled himself vice-chancellor of a non-existent 'Premier University of Technology' and, The Daily Star said, of two other invented institutions, Pitch Blende University of Science and Technology and Peace Land University. Arrested with him were an associate, Moazzem Hossain, 58, and four men police described as fake MBBS doctors: Saidur Rahman, 30, Mahfuzur Rahman, 37, Aman Ullah, 38, and Debashish Kundu, 52.
The Daily Star quoted DB Additional Commissioner AKM Hafiz Akhter as saying the racket had sold certificates for two decades through the fake institution, charging Tk 5 lakh for a local certificate and Tk 25 lakh for a foreign one. Police said hundreds of forged certificates had gone out across 144 subjects, among them MBBS, BDS, MPhil, PhD, engineering and advocateship. Akhter said the group advertised on fake websites, in newspapers and on social media; The Business Standard added that the advertisements described computerised campuses that did not exist, and that the group showed customers fake home ministry orders and a fake High Court writ.
The racket did not simply forge paper; it built a shell with a name, a 'vice-chancellor', websites and official-looking documents, so a casual search found something that looked like a university. The pricing shows where the weak spot lay: a foreign certificate cost five times a local one, most likely because a degree from abroad is far harder for an employer or family to check. The Daily Star reported that detectives were still tracing holders of the fake MBBS certificates and advised the public to check a doctor's BMDC registration number before consulting a specialist.
The lesson for a family considering medicine, at home or abroad, is plain. Confirm that an institution appears on the regulator's approved list before paying any fee, and if it is foreign, look it up in the World Directory of Medical Schools. Treat any 'university' that sells degrees at a fixed price, with no examination and no years of study, as a forgery ring. Pay the institution, not an intermediary, keep your originals, and check any doctor against the council register, because in Malibagh a nameplate listing degrees proved nothing.
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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.