Thousands of British nationals possess fake degrees bought from the Pakistani fake diploma company Axact, according to British Broadcasting Service (BBC) on Tuesday.
The revelation was made on BBC Radio 4’s File on Four programme that founds after investigations that a large number of fake degrees were bought by National Health Service (NHS) consultants, nurses, and a large defence contractor in the United Kingdom (UK). According to the report, one British citizen spent an amazing £500,000 on acquiring bogus documents.
The report further revealed that around 3,000 fake Axact degrees were sold to UK-based buyers in 2013 and 2014, which included specialized master’s, doctorate, and PhD degrees.
Some of the buyers included a consultant employed at a London teaching hospital who bought a degree in internal medicine in 2007 from a fake university, namely Belford University. A defence contractor had also purchased degrees from Axact between 2013 and 2015 for seven of its employees, including two fake helicopter pilots.
A former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Allen Ezell, who had been investigating the activities of Axact since the 1980s, said during the programme that the company had expanded its operations into the businesses of extortion and blackmail.
In one such incidence, a British engineer working in Saudi Arabia was receiving threatening calls from Axact agents even after he had paid around £500,000 for fake documents to the company.
Responding to the programme, the UK’s Department for Education said that it was taking “decisive action to crack down on degree fraud” that “cheats genuine learners”.
Axact claims to be the “world’s largest IT company”, and operates hundreds of fake online universities run by agents from a Karachi call centre. In 2015, it sold more than 215,000 fake degrees globally through approximately 350 fictitious high schools and universities, making $51m (£37.5m) that year alone.
Axact’s chief executive was arrested and an investigation was launched by the Pakistani authorities after a New York Times expose in 2015. A senior manager of the company, Umair Hamid, was sentenced to 21 months in a United States prison in August 2017 for his part in Axact’s fraud. The BBC said Axact did not respond to a request for an interview.