Twelve charged, a vice-rector accused, over a thousand fake enrolment documents: the Polish private universities that sold EU entry as "study"

Poland's medical universities — Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Lublin, Gdańsk and others — run long-established English-language divisions and are among Europe's most reputable destinations for foreign medical students. The case Notes from Poland reported in October 2025 is not about them. It is about how the words "university" and "student" can be sold by institutions that are neither, and why a student choosing Poland must check which kind they are dealing with.

On 8 October 2025, prosecutors charged twelve people, Polish and Ukrainian citizens, over a scheme in which three private universities issued more than a thousand false enrolment and study documents to foreigners. The alleged ringleader was identified in the report as Radosław Z., described as the vice-rector of the University of International and Regional Cooperation (WSWMiR) in Wołomin, near Warsaw. The certificates, prosecutors said, were sold for between 500 and 6,000 złoty (roughly €117 to €1,400) and were used to enter the European Union, obtain residence permits and in some cases Polish citizenship; some Ukrainian men used them during the pandemic to bypass travel restrictions and later to avoid conscription. Beneficiaries came from more than twenty countries, including Ukraine, China, Colombia and Nigeria. The charges — participation in an organised criminal group, facilitating illegal residence, forgery and money laundering — carry up to ten years. All the accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The medical-student relevance is indirect but real. First, the same sales channel — agents abroad with "partner universities" in Poland — carries both genuine medical-division applications and paper like this; the Ghaziabad consultancy published on this site sold "admissions" in Poland and Germany that the universities had never issued. Second, a student who is placed at an institution of this kind, believing it to be a route into medicine or a preparatory year, has bought a visa, not an education, and will discover it when a genuine university asks for verifiable prior study. Third, once such a case is public, every applicant from the affected countries faces closer scrutiny; documents that are genuine but arrived via an agent can be questioned.

Poland makes the check easy. Medical programmes for foreigners are run by public medical universities whose English divisions publish their own admissions calendars, entrance exams and fees, and whose offer letters come from university domains; the Ministry of Science's POL-on register lists every institution entitled to award degrees and at what level. A "university" that is not there, or that offers medicine without an entrance process, is not a university a doctor comes out of.