📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
Twenty-one "doctors" arrested in five months: a forged title in an anaesthesiology residency, a surgeon trained on YouTube, and the Venezuelan hospitals that did not check
Venezuela's collapse has emptied its hospitals of doctors, and the gap has been filled in part by people who are not doctors at all. In 2022 the country's press began counting them.
According to El Pitazo, at least 19, later 21, false doctors were detained in Venezuela within five months, across regions and specialities. Voice of America and El Carabobeño asked why, and the answers from doctors' associations were the exodus of qualified staff, hospitals desperate for anyone in a white coat, and verification that had stopped happening. The cases reported include a 29-year-old who worked as an anaesthesiology resident at the University Hospital of Maracaibo on a forged university title; a man arrested with a fake title from the Rómulo Gallegos experimental university and a stock of hyaluronic acid for fillers; a 46-year-old woman who had practised for twenty years as a "surgeon specialising in homeopathy" on a forged title; a 34-year-old who performed cosmetic surgery having learned from YouTube and Facebook videos; and a man fitting braces in Maturín as an orthodontist without a licence. Diario Vea reported the arrest of a false surgeon in Caracas.
The Maracaibo case is the one that should worry students most. A residency place in a university hospital was granted to a forged title, which means the hospital, the university and the federation of medical colleges had between them not verified the document at source. A system under enough strain stops checking, and a forged degree then works as well as a real one, until it does not.
Venezuela also trains foreign students, and the case is a measure of what a degree is worth from a system where verification has lapsed. If the hospitals do not check their own residents, foreign regulators will check Venezuelan graduates more, not less, and slowly. A degree's value is partly the rigour of the system that stands behind it.
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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.