WHAT IS AXACT AND HOW DID IT WORK?
Operating from the Pakistan port city ■ of Karachi, Axact used to employ more than 2,000 people and called itself Pakistan’s largest software exporter. But Axact’s main business was to take ■ the centuries-old scam of selling fake academic degrees and turn it into an internet-era scheme on a global scale. As interest in online education boomed, ■ the company aggressively positioned its school and websites to appear prominently in online searches, luring in potential international customers.
As a result, unsuspecting degree aspirants ■ got themselves registered with fake university websites after being lured by their advertisements on social media. As soon as they registered, a live chat window would pop open and a Pakistanbased call centre agent, masquerading as a US-based university professor, would seek the candidate’s contact details. The agent would then call the candidate ■ and urge him/her to enrol for diploma/degree by paying a minimum of
$200 via credit card and avail of an early-bird discount on the fees. Customers were advised to move to “better” universities where fees would range from
$10,000 to $30,000. A team of inhouse content writers would then send some online education material. Candidates were also referred to other ■ Axact-owned websites to seek help in submitting assignments and writing thesis, with charges ranging from $500 to $5,000. But a new customer is just the start. To ■ meet their monthly targets, Axact sales agents were schooled in tough tactics known as ‘upselling’. Sometimes they would cold-call prospective students, pretending to be corporate recruitment agents with a lucrative job offer — but only if the student bought an online course. A more lucrative form of ‘upselling’ ■ involved impersonating US government officials who would bully customers into buying forged State Department authentication certificates purportedly signed by the then US secretary of state, John Kerry.
Social media added a further patina of ■ legitimacy. LinkedIn contained profiles of purported faculty members of Axact universities — such as Christina Gardener, described as a senior consultant at Hillford University and a former vice-president at Southwestern Energy, a publicly-listed company in Houston. The heart of Axact’s business was the ■ sales team — young and well-educated Pakistanis, fluent in English and/or Arabic, who would work the phones with customers drawn in by the websites. These sales team members would offer everything — from high school diplomas, for about $350, to doctoral degrees, for $4,000 and above.
At Axact’s headquarters, telephone ■ sales agents would work in shifts around the clock. Sometimes they would cater to customers who clearly understood they were buying a shady instant degree for money. But often the agents would manipulate those seeking real education, pushing them to enrol for coursework that never materialised. Revenue, estimated by former employees ■ and fraud probe experts to be several million dollars per month, were cycled through a network of offshore companies. All the while, Axact’s role as the owner of this fake education empire remained obscured by proxy internet services, combative legal tactics and lax regulations.
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. In 2007, for example, a British ■ court jailed Gene Morrison, a fake police criminologist who had claimed to have obtained degree certificates from the Axact-owned Rochville University.