How Journalists are Fighting Back Against Fake Degree Mills
Investigative journalism is comparable to solving a puzzle. You start with a bunch of jumbled pieces and slowly, they come together to form a picture.
Watchdog journalism is crucial to any democratic system. It is able to hold people accountable by exposing corrupt practices and abuses of power. This type of journalism that has taken place, from Upton Sinclair’s exposé on the meatpacking business to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovering Watergate, has had a significant impact.
Fake Academic Credentials
Fraudulent academic credentials are an industry worth billions of dollars that has millions of customers across the globe buying fake certificates and degrees. Fake diplomas can be purchased in various forms, starting with a single operator running a printer out of New York City’s Chinatown and up to an online service that provides already-made diplomas.
Degree mills, which were once was the sole domain of small-scale operators who would make certificates at their tables in the kitchen and selling them on matchbook covers, are now modernized with slick websites chat rooms, edu suffixes for their domain names, and pseudo-accrediting organizations that have cited strict, but not defined – standards. This billion-dollar business lets you achieve a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or doctorate without attending classes, taking tests or performing any other work.
Making up a fake transcript for a college is another method to get fake diplomas. And if you get found guilty, it’s a white-collar crime, which can lead to jail time.
To find out how easy it is to obtain fake degrees from universities, Marketplace teamed up with former FBI agent Allen Ezell to purchase one from Almeda University, an online school that offered the PhD in biblical counseling. Using an alias, Lack was able to provide Almeda University with backstory over the phone and then qualified to receive the degree by giving some of his professional qualifications.
Diploma Mills Investigation
The fake diploma industry is a billion-dollar enterprise according to the experts. Marketplace investigated one of the biggest players, a Pakistan-based diploma factory called Axact, by examining the company’s records, looking at customer information and cross-referencing social media profiles. In the end, we discovered a lot of Canadians who could have bought degrees from this fake school and read more at https://lambang-toanquoc.com/.
Although there are laws that prohibit selling and misrepresenting fraudulent credentials but it’s a thorny legal matter to bring charges against diploma mills. This issue is a thorny one that has drawn the attention of UNESCO and federal prosecutors as well as the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission. It remains a challenging task for investigators, despite the increasing number of watchdog groups.
Many of these fake institutions have names that sound eerily like the names of genuine schools. As a result, it can be difficult to distinguish them. Professional background screeners are like detectives and they use their training to identify the red flags that an applicant has in his academic background.
Other clues that the diploma mill is fraudulent include a name that is suspiciously similar and a address or website that does not include the university’s location. Visiting these universities in the real world, as our reporters did with New World Mission Dunamis International University in Cape Town and Northern Ireland Institute of Business Technology in Belfast is yet another crucial action to uncover diploma mills.
Integrity of Qualifications in the field of education. Qualifications
Investigative journalism is an art that requires a lot of perseverance and a thorough knowledge of how to find patterns and anomalies. Investigative journalism requires a variety of capabilities, including document analysis, anonymous and recorded interviews, subscription-based tools for research, etc. The work is often laborious and time-consuming, but it can uncover the truth, and make powerful individuals, politicians and criminals accountable.
Marketplace For instance, they investigated Axact’s largest diploma mill and uncovered records of business. They also compared customer data to determine if customers were interested in purchasing fake degrees. The team also visited fake schools such as New World Mission Dunamis International University, South Africa, and Northern Ireland Institute of Business Technology, London to verify their authenticity as well as learn more about what they do.
Gollin explains that diploma mills have a double impact: they devalue the legitimate diplomas that students obtain after spending years and thousands of dollars to earn. Additionally, they expose the public to risk when professionals such as engineers and doctors lack proper qualifications.
Investigative journalism is crucial for this reason. Whether it’s the Watergate scandal that rocked America as well as the most recent Nobel Peace Prize winners Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov for their fight for freedom of speech in Russia and Philippines and the Philippines, investigative journalism is able to uncover corruption and make the world a more secure place.
Counterfeit Degrees Exposed
The business of bogus degrees is booming worldwide, with the industry doing an estimated $7 billion annually. The industry’s exploding growth is at least in part due to the ease with that people are now able to obtain fake diplomas. The industry also flourishes because people want to earn money and work which is why they embellish their resumes using fake degrees, even though it can be dangerous for them.
Degree mills continue to exist despite increased scrutiny by authorities because of their business motives. The scammers are able to produce fake degrees in a single year, with minimal overhead by using software and outsourcing the actual personnel. Some of these phony schools even have advertisements in legitimate publications and newspapers, such as the Economist USA Today, Forbes, Psychology Today, Discover, Investors Business Daily, and regional editions of Time and Newsweek.
Declan Walsh, an investigative journalist who exposed Axact’s fake degree empire recently shared documents he uncovered in his investigation with journalists all over the world. They also shared scans of registration forms for mailboxes owned by Belford High School in Texas and California and Belford University, as well as letters from an erroneous International Accreditation Organization and screenshots from the Axact’s internal publication. Some of these documents were used by the BBC in the production of the documentary, File on 4: Degrees of Deceit, which will be airing this week on the Radio 4 show, ‘File on Four’.
