How I hunt down fake degrees and zombie universities

André Hesselbäck has spent the past 22 years hunting down fraudulent organizations that sell phoney degrees with no academic requirements or proper accreditation. Credential fraud encompasses diplomas, degrees, transcripts, certificates and other documents that are sold by bogus institutions that do not render genuine academic services. The practice, Hesselbäck says, has links to organized crime — and according to one estimate, it generates several billion US dollars each year.

Hesselbäck’s work spans many regions, but his current main focus is South Asia, which has both large student populations and many universities that are unrecognized by accreditation organizations. This is a far cry from his first job in higher education: after graduating with a PhD in Finno-Ugric languages, which include Hungarian and Finnish, from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2001, he chose academic administration because he wanted a stable career path and a role that allowed him to explore his interest in different educational systems.

Still living in Uppsala, he is now an analyst and credential evaluator — someone who assesses academic or professional qualifications and their comparability between countries — at the Swedish Council for Higher Education (UHR), a government organization based in Solna. Hesselbäck is matter-of-fact about the huge scale of academic fraud. He estimates that, in some sectors including economics and engineering, “10–15% of the workforce are graduates of degree mills or unrecognized, substandard schools” in certain countries. Costs tend to rise with the degree level. People pay up to tens of thousands of dollars for fake doctoral or medical degrees from such companies.

It’s not straightforward to determine whether a particular credential is invalid, says Hesselbäck. “It’s easier to prove that a university is legitimate than it is to prove that a university is fake,” he adds. It can be especially thorny when a degree was granted in an unrecognized or occupied territory, such as Somaliland or Crimea.

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On a daily basis, he fields queries from prospective employers in both the private and public sectors, and from universities seeking to admit graduate students or recruit faculty members. He also conducts research as part of the European Network of Information Centres–National Academic Recognition Information Centres, an umbrella organization of more than 50 national bodies, including the UHR, that provide information on credential recognition.

Degree-mill operators have seized on the growing scale and prestige of US research universities over the past century, he says. Their bogus websites might show images of idyllic campuses reminiscent of the Ivy League, a group of prestigious US universities, and have names such as Barkley or Manhattan Bay University that resemble those of familiar US institutions.

One helpful asset is Hesselbäck’s strong memory, for instance when spotting suspect similarities between website images and text. “He has this mind,” marvels Zeba Safi, another UHR credential evaluator, whose command of a handful of Asian languages has been a boon in her work. “You say a number, and he remembers it,” whether that’s an address or a case number from a long-ago investigation, she says.

His background in linguistics might also help, but his photographic memory for numbers, words and images is “something I’ve always had”, Hesselbäck says.

The work requires strong attention to detail, to keep up as degree mills change their modus operandi. Some fraudsters adopt the name of a defunct but once-legitimate university, creating what Hesselbäck calls a zombie university. For instance, Hesselbäck once checked website registration details and official sources in Latin America to discover that a Mexican university that had previously gone out of business had popped up several years later in connection with students in Sri Lanka.

Real harms, but slow reactions

According to Hesselbäck, in Sweden it’s not illegal for a job applicant to submit qualifications from a fake university, although it is a crime to forge an academic transcript or degree from a legitimate university. The relevant laws vary by country.

In Norway, he adds, it is a criminal offence to submit credentials from a fake university, but the burden of proof has to be strong. At the federal level, the United States does not explicitly prohibit the issuing, holding or advertising of bogus degrees, although some states have laws banning them. In practice, individual holders of phoney medical degrees have surrendered their licences or been removed from their positions. Public exposure leads to embarrassment and, in some cases, resignations. And legal cases can be pursued against degree mills through the creative application of laws that prohibit financial fraud through the mail or telecommunications.

But even so, Hesselbäck says, degree fraud is not seen as a problem — so governments aren’t taking it seriously enough. Last year, he and six co-authors wrote a report that provided recommendations to counter education fraud for member states of the Council of Europe, an organization promoting democracy, rule of law and human rights in Europe. The authors wrote that, to address the problem effectively, governments need to establish clear laws on the consequences of using fraudulent degrees, and then enforce them.

“[Governments] have no idea about the dimension of it all,” Hesselbäck comments. Retired US FBI investigator Allen Ezell estimates that providing bogus degrees is a US$7-billion-per-year business. And this is far from a victimless crime, Hesselbäck stresses. “The main victim is the legitimate higher-education system”, which can lose revenue as well as credibility. There are also individuals who are affected, such as the customers of an engineer, doctor or other professional with fraudulent credentials. Students who have been duped into unwittingly purchasing invalid degrees are also harmed by the practice.

Then, there are the people who work hard for their degrees, only to lose out on opportunities to others who took shortcuts. Hesselbäck knows of at least one lecturer at a US university and two people employed by Swedish universities who obtained degrees through degree mills.

“Traditionally, higher-education systems have been very slow to react to this,” Hesselbäck says. Many people found to be using false degrees face limited disciplinary actions, if any (with the notable exception of fake medical degrees). He gives the example of a woman teaching at a US university who was found to have obtained a PhD from a Russian degree mill. The university allowed her to retain a teaching position, telling her simply not to use the ‘Dr’ title.

The issue extends to university admissions as well: “In Sweden, the problem is probably bigger when it comes to admission to PhD programmes.” Hesselbäck says that, compared with universities, non-academic employers are more concerned about fake degrees because “they want to make sure the individual has the claimed knowledge and skills and will be able to make adequate contributions based on that”. He thinks that some universities, meanwhile, might have a more relaxed attitude towards fake credentials if they view tuition-paying students as customers.

Hesselbäck reports that he’s been sued or threatened with legal action several times, but no case has come to fruition. And he is not overly worried about his own safety given the various links that his work and that of others have uncovered between organized crime and large degree mills. Because his role involves supplying information to law enforcement, rather than carrying out enforcement himself, Hesselbäck thinks others are at greater risk. “Much of my work is less visible,” he says.

Decades tracking a big target

Hesselbäck’s long-standing preoccupation is Axact, a sprawling media and software empire operating from Karachi.

The company first came onto Hesselbäck’s radar in 2005, when some masters’ students were admitted to the Faculty of Mathematics and Technology at Uppsala University. He didn’t recognize the names of any of the universities they had previously attended, and couldn’t find them in official sources. After looking at the institutions’ websites, he noticed that many had a similar appearance. He checked the website registration information, which included an address in Pakistan. And he realized that the disclaimer on all of the peculiar university websites was identical to the disclaimer on Axact’s website.

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This spotting of similarities and tracing of names would snowball over the years. For instance, Hesselbäck drew connections between an accreditation organization being paid by a Cyprus-based company, which was directed by Shoaib Ahmad Shaikh, the chief executive of Axact. On the basis of his research, Hesselbäck suspects that Axact has created more than 4,000 websites, including fake government agencies and fictitious universities that might exist on a website or a diploma, but not in any meaningful sense.

From the findings of his work and others’, Hesselbäck thinks that “Axact is by far the largest” of the degree mills. He estimates that it has sold more than nine million fake degrees, largely in the United States and the Middle East, but spanning just about every country in the world. The company seems to have grown with dizzying speed and changes of tactics.

In a 2008 civil case between Axact and Student Network Resources, a former academic-essay-editing service based in Manalapan, New Jersey, a US judge stated that Axact “operates and/or controls a score of websites, using hundreds of domain names, in a number of Internet businesses based in Pakistan. [These include] sites selling term papers and other academic works, and sites selling counterfeit academic degrees and/or diplomas from non-existent universities with no instructors or classrooms.” When Axact’s lawyers failed to appear before the court, the judge ruled by default against them and included damages under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.

In 2015, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Authority raided Axact and arrested executives, including Shaikh. They were initially charged with dishonestly inducing students to acquire degrees from Axact’s fake universities and with blackmailing students to extort money. However, last year, the Sindh High Court in Karachi acquitted Shaikh and the others of all charges.

In 2017, an Axact executive, then assistant vice-president Umair Hamid, pleaded guilty in a US court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. According to court documents, Axact had falsely claimed customers would receive instruction at legitimate educational institutions. The company collected upfront fees and then issued worthless diplomas from roughly 350 non-existent schools and universities. Hamid admitted that “the degree program websites run by clients were mostly not real universities or colleges with real coursework”, and that people who gave the company money were misled. Axact did not respond to several requests from Nature for comment.

However, the company continues to operate — and Hesselbäck, undeterred, continues to follow it.

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“The experts on degree mills are getting older and fewer,” says Hesselbäck, who is 60. “And this means that a lot of information and a lot of knowledge will be lost.”

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This also worries 83-year-old Ezell, whose FBI team dismantled more than 40 degree mills and who has collaborated frequently with Hesselbäck over the past decade. There are a few researchers who study credential fraud from a research-ethics standpoint. There are also other credential evaluators, such as Safi. But in terms of dedicated investigators, “there is nobody following us”, Ezell says.

Safi, who has been mentored by Hesselbäck, calls it the “work of decades. And you can’t possibly pass it on to someone in a year or two or three.” Nor, she says, can their burning interest in credential fraud — the kind of work they carry on into the evening, or into retirement — be easily taught.

As the number of investigators dwindles, the types of fraudulent activity proliferate, says Ezell. But some efforts are under way to share information on education fraud across generations and across borders. The Council of Europe is discussing creating an organization dedicated to combating education fraud. And at the UHR, Safi, Hesselbäck and their colleague Erik Johansson are building a directory of degree mills and of unrecognized, substandard providers of higher education.

Although government frameworks and cooperation are crucial to stemming the tide of credential fraud, individual employers and universities must remain vigilant about checking credentials. “You’ve got to verify everything all the time,” Ezell stresses.

Hesselbäck, meanwhile, continues plugging away and raising awareness about the massive scale of the problem: “Even though it’s sometimes an uphill struggle, I still find this work necessary.”