FIA takes away Axact hardware on ‘rickshaws’

KARACHI:

Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Thursday seized more hardware from the office of beleaguered IT firm Axact, which is under fire from all sides after a New York Times report accused it of selling fake diplomas online, according to reports.

What FIA has claimed may sound true but their story has some holes in it.

It seems as if Axactians, assuming they are involved in the scam, were waiting for the FIA agents with all this ‘hard evidence’ including blank degrees and likely hot foil stamping/embossing machine in a platter ready for the taking.

It is interesting to note, the FIA men, could not even bring an official vehicle to take the hard evidence back to their office –or maybe they made their visit to Axact look like a raid by whimsically grabbing more ‘hard evidence.’

Having no choice, the agents from the underfunded Cyber Crime Circle of the agency loaded all the impounded evidence on unguarded/ unsafe auto-rickshaws driven by untrustworthy/ unknown drivers and lugged it to their unit. Nobody knows if the rickshaw drivers were paid for their services.

Backstory

According to sources privy to the fraudulent matters of the firm, money laundering through Hundi is also under investigation, among others.

Earlier, investigators carried out raids on the offices of Axact accused of running a global fake degree empire, officials said, confiscating computers and holding employees for questioning as the scandal deepened.

Axact was accused by the New York Times of running a network of hundreds of websites for phoney universities complete with paid actors for promotional videos, as part of an elaborate scheme that generated tens of millions of dollars annually.

Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officers swooped on the Karachi headquarters of the company, seizing equipment and records and expelling employees from the building, a member of the raiding party told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile the company’s Rawalpindi office has been sealed and employees were being questioned at the site, an official said.

The same official had earlier said that two employees had been arrested, but later clarified they were being quizzed and had not been charged with a crime.

“The raid is still ongoing,” Mehmood ul Hassan, acting director of the FIA’s Cyber Crime Wing, told AFP.

“Our team is gathering evidence. Our director general will release all details about the raid once it’s completed.”

The move came shortly after Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told the agency to probe “if the said company is involved in any such illegal work which can tarnish the good image of the country in the world”.

The report by the New York Times, which quoted former employees and analysed more than 370 websites of fake universities, accreditation bodies and other purported institutions, sparked a wave of criticism on social media even as the company denied wrongdoing.

Axact’s media venture named Bol is set to launch a news channel, featuring leading TV anchors and journalists lured from previous employers by high salaries, heightening interest in the story.

The NYT article cited clients from the US, Britain and the United Arab Emirates who had paid sums ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars for their degrees — with some believing the universities were real and they would soon receive coursework.

The “university” websites mainly route their traffic through servers run by companies registered in Cyprus and Latvia, and employees would plant fictitious reports about Axact universities on CNN iReport, a website for citizen journalism.

Axact and its CEO, Shoaib Ahmad Shaikh, did not respond to requests from AFP for comment on Monday or Tuesday.

But a message on its website declared the story “baseless, substandard, maligning, defamatory, and based on false accusations” and added it would sue the New York Times.

The message did not directly address the allegations but accused domestic media rivals of colluding with the US newspaper to plant a slanderous story in order to harm its business interests.

According to an FIA official who did not wish to be named, the allegations raised by the newspaper would be a crime under Pakistan’s Electronic Transaction Ordinance, punishable by seven years in prison.