Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire
writes
Declan Walsh in a major New York Times report:
hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.
Yet
on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news
reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university
campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees
have no true accreditation.
In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm,
appearing to span at least 370 websites,
is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated
revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the
world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.
That company,
Axact, operates from the port city of Karachi, where it employs over 2,000 people and calls itself
Pakistan’s largest software exporter, with Silicon Valley-style employee perks like a swimming pool and yacht.
Axact
does sell some software applications. But according to former insiders,
company records and a detailed analysis of its websites, Axact’s main
business has been to take the centuries-old scam of selling fake
academic degrees and turn it into an Internet-era scheme on a global
scale.
… In academia, diploma mills have long been seen as a nuisance. But the proliferation of Internet-based degree schemes has
raised concerns
about their possible use in immigration fraud, and about dangers they
may pose to public safety and legal systems. In 2007, for example, a
British court jailed Gene Morrison, a fake police criminologist
who claimed to have degree certificates from the Axact-owned Rochville University, among other places.
Little
of this is known in Pakistan, where Axact has dodged questions about
its diploma business and has portrayed itself as a roaring success and
model corporate citizen. …/…
Real-Life Troubles
Many
customers of degree operations, hoping to secure a promotion or pad
their résumé, are clearly aware that they are buying the educational
equivalent of a knockoff Rolex. Some have been caught.
In the United States, one
federal prosecution in 2008
revealed that 350 federal employees, including officials at the
departments of State and Justice, held qualifications from a
non-Axact-related
diploma mill operation based in Washington State.
The effects have sometimes been deeply disruptive. In Britain, the
police had to re-examine 700 cases
that Mr. Morrison, the falsely credentialed police criminologist and
Rochville graduate, had worked on. “It looked easier than going to a
real university,” Mr. Morrison said during his 2007 trial.
In
the Middle East, Axact has sold aeronautical degrees to airline
employees, and medical degrees to hospital workers. One nurse at a large
hospital in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, admitted to spending
$60,000 on an Axact-issued medical degree to secure a promotion.
But there is also evidence that many Axact customers are dupes, lured by the promise of a real online education.
