At least two people have been discovered impersonating others in the 2013 national college entrance exam, which falls on July 4 and 5 or 9 and 10 this year, depending on each candidate’s major.

Tran Duc Luu, 26, was caught red-handed last Thursday while he was taking the math test for an unnamed applicant at an exam center in Hanoi.

Luu, who had been dismissed from college, admitted that he was hired to impersonate the applicant, who was seeking admission to the Hanoi-based Vietnam People’s Security Academy because they look alike.

Police said they would not file criminal complaints against Luu because this is just an isolated deal between two people, not part of an organized ring.

But the applicant is set to be disqualified from the exam, according to regulations by the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET), the exam organizer.

One day later another such case was uncovered at the University of Fire Prevention and Firefighting, also located in the Vietnamese capital, when Do Quang Ngoc, 32, was found pretending to be Nguyen Anh Dung, 18, to take the chemistry test.

Ngoc confessed that an intermediary paid him VND10 million to impersonate Dung, although he did not know the candidate. He has a relative in Dung’s hometown, the northern province of Tuyen Quang, the man added.

Local police are hunting for the middleman, who they suspect may be the relative, and have not ruled out the chance that Dung had paid a larger amount of money for the pretense.

Unlike many other countries that recruit students for higher education based mainly on their high school performance, Vietnam annually requires those bound for college to pass tests in a national exam.

Candidates are required to sit for papers on a set of three subjects chosen from math, physics, chemistry, literature, history, geography, biology, and foreign languages to be admitted to the college of their choice.