"Bail granted for alleged operators of online diploma mill"

Bail granted for alleged operators of online diploma mill, Associated Press (perhaps based on Bill Morlin's reporting for the Spokane Spokesman-Review), Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 27, 2005.

 

Woed is getting out

This guy pops up when you do the usual search for a PhD from St Regis:

http://www.dennischandler.com/bio.html

Hoever, it is apparently finding something in the archives because all I can find is reference to his Alameda degrees....

This guy is apparently still clueless, not that the school appars to be any gem:

http://www.irvineuniversity.edu/liberalarts/coa_fac.asp

see Prof Zack

 

300 colleges in six years. That's 50 colleges a month. Over ten colleges a week from just one set of frauds, it just demonstrates how impossible it would ever be to have a complete list of all the diploma mills.

 

Re: Woed is getting out

A Ph.D. and a Ed.D. in two years. Very impressive.

 

While my advanced math skills hint rather towards 4 colleges a months, and therefore one college a week, they could have had a "college of the week"!

 

Its about volume not quality

 

I don't know what "the usual" search is, but I just did this one:

• "saint regis university" OR "st. regis university" OR "st regis university" site:.edu

and got the following:

• Roger Sprague, Instructor
  - MS Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments from Saint Regis University
  - BSEE from Saint Regis University
  Working at Bradley Academy for the Visual Arts (York, PA) (Accredited)
  
• Ashley K. Davis, Assistant Professor of Music
  Ph.D. from Saint Regis University
  Working at LeMoyne-Owen College (Memphis, TN) (Accredited)
  
• Yanni Zafiropoulos Zack, Professor
  Ph.D. in Education, Saint Regis University
  Irvine University (Cerritos, CA) (Unaccredited) (not in USDE or CHEA databases)
  
• Joel Leib, Adjunct Instructor
  BA Graphic Art from St. Regis University
  Working at Bradley Academy for the Visual Arts (York, PA) (Accredited)
  
• Brenda Talley, Interim Dir., Performing Arts Center (PDF)
  BA from St. Regis University
  Working at Community College of Southern Nevada (Las Vegas, NV) (Accredited)
  
• Charles Pharis, Conference Participant (PDF)
  PhD in Forensic Psychology from St. Regis University
  Conference at Midwestern State University (Wichita Falls, TX) (Accredited)

If one removes the site:.edu requirement from the search criteria, there's no telling how many more people in responsible, respectable positions touting SRU credentials could be found. Not too scary.

I notice that several of the Google search results links don't work anymore, but you can tell from the Google listing what the name of the person was before the page on which they were listed was taken down. In the case of at least two of them, I was able to determine from looking at a faculty phone directory that they still had a university extension and email address. So, in the wake of the whole St. Regis mess, we may have universities scrambling to take down web pages which show faculty with St. Regis degrees, but said universities may not also be dismissing them. One of them is the The University of Maine at Machias, which has a HIPAA policy... ironic, that, since HIPAA policies, just generally, tend to have strong ethical components; and frightening, that, since HIPAA policies prescribe ethical behavior in the area of health care.

Oy.



As for keeping on topic by actually responding to the thread-starting post...

I wonder if the Randocks will stay around to be tried, or if they'll skip. And if they don't skip (or even if they do, now that I think about it), whatdaya' bet that, until then, they can't keep away from AED; and that they go there, resuming the spew of their normal vitriol, thereby violating the terms of their release!

Finally, what's the deal with the $200K in the Randock's back yard? I'm not sure I'd heard about that one before.

 

Thank you for the correction. Sorry about that, my calculus is a little rusty I guess. Only one college a week? Perhaps they were real institutions of higher learning after all?

 

U.S. Magistrate Judge Cynthia Imbrogno agreed Wednesday to release Dixie E. and Steven K. Randock Sr. on bond, but banned them from using the Internet for anything but a real estate licensing venture.

Not even for porn? That's un-American!

And what's "a real estate licensing venture"? Are they selling fake real estate licenses, too?

 

Another update - http://www.kxly.com/common/getStory.asp?id=45654

Cheers,

George

 

I'll bet that they skip. Does Las Vegas have a line on this yet? I'll put down some big money...at least ten bucks.

They have so many phony names, I can't believe that they didn't buy some phony passports. If they don't skip then I can only believe that they are going to give up every single name in their little black books in order to shorten their sentences.
Jack

 

Including the names of everyone who bought one of their phony-baloney degrees? Hmm...




Tom Nixon

 

Bill Morlin's article, posted with his permission

Bill Morlin has given permission for his entire October 27 Spokane Spokesman-Review article to be posted. There is a photograph included in the article which is included in a link at the end of the text.

 

I love seeing frauds being sad. I also like it when I hear about criminals ratting each other out. Note that these are just general descriptions of things I like and should not necessarily be interpreted as having anything to do with this particular thread.

 

It works the other way - the people in their book give up Steve and Dixie. Steve and Dixie are the ones the feds want - not the students. The feds already caught the big fish and Steve and Dixie have no bargaining tools in their tool chest. It would be as bad a crime to let them off, as their crime was.
PAT

 

Re: Bill Morlin's article, posted with his permission

Dixie doesn't look nearly as "hot" in this more recent photo as she did on the one on her A+ website for her realty school. I guess the stress of lawsuits and the possibility of prison have taken their toll. In addition, from the looks of it that cadaver she's married to (Steve) clearly does not know how to take care of business.....

I'm sure she will hold her own in prison, much like the Blue Collar TV vignettes about "Martha Stewart Living" from the big house....

 

Still they use

Hi,
Still they use internet to abuse others (they are in militaryforum also).

Can anyone please advise, where can I give the details I know about them?

I am ready to submit whatever I have about them, to the concerened authorities.

Thank you

 

you know already

Dear Azad,

You know perfectly well where to send information.

Why are you asking that question here at this time? Please explain.

 

I'm not sure that I agree with that.

I have nothing more to go on than mere suspicions, but I don't really see the Randocks as the real SRU perpetrators. I mean, just a few years ago Dixie was selling her real estate courses while her husband worked in his dad's business. Then they started some rather crude fake-education things on the internet. (Degreeinfo noted them early on, but the search function is dead.) The point I'm trying to make is that her work was clearly amateurish, while SRU was very imaginative and rather slick. My take was (and continues to be) that she was just a small-time internet scamster, while the SRU crowd were professionals.

Later people like John Dovelos were insisting that the corrupt (unnamed) old-timers were no longer associated with SRU and that SRU had new (unnamed) owners. The school had turned the corner and was now a sincere and legitimate higher education institution. The credible Liberian accreditation system was helping it shape up and we should all accept it as 'GAAP'.

If there was any truth beneath what Dovelos was saying, it now seems that the new owners were the Randocks. (I'd be interested in what they paid to buy SRU. Did they get the money out of dad's business?) The smart guys, the original perpetrators, probably were smart enough to see trouble coming, the likelihood that SRU would implode, and the need to take their profits and move on. So they might have been very happy to sell it to some chumps whose greed exceeded their brains. That's my suspicion about what might have happened.

I don't really think that the Randocks were major degree mill operators who created hundreds of schools. They don't really seem like the types. They are probably just the clowns who have ended up taking the fall for those that did.

An interesting figure here is Novak. He seems to be a smart guy who stayed on. He had the connections in Liberia, he made the flights. I'd be curious to know what his precise role has been in this. I bet that he knows a lot. The consumate SRU insider.

But my point is that everyone knows who created SRU and built it up. (Except me, Degreeinfo and presumably the feds.) Dovelos knows. Azad knows. The Randocks know. Novak knows. The Liberians know.

My suspicion is that there really have been some rather big-time degree-mill operators involved in this sorry story, and I'd guess that the federal investigators might want to pursue that angle, moving upstream, hoping to pressure the little fish to give up the names of those who are higher on the international internet-fraud food-chain.

Again, I have no evidence for any of that except my own intuitions based on what I've read here.

 

I dunno, Bill. You may be right, of course, but that $700,000 home and nearly a quarter-mil in a hole in the back yard suggests that the Randocks are pretty high up in the food chain.

That said, it probably would make sense for the feds to press for information about previous owners. The problem is that in order to get them to talk, the feds would have to trade something. And for what? The involvment of earlier others was long enough ago that good cases against them could probably no longer be made. The feds have the Randocks, et al, right where they want them. A bird in the hand, and all that kinda' stuff.

Still... you raise an interesting angle on it. Hmmm.

I'll bet I know!

But I'll sit quietly for a while and wait for Azad's answer.

This should be interesting.

I am fairly convinced, though, that Dixie is back online posting her vitriolic spew on AED and in other places... in clear violation of the terms of her bail. I wish just one of the agents on this case would take a lousy day to get some subpoenas and hunt down the IP addresses of some of the posts that seem most obviously hers (based on the ones we knew she used to make). Nothing ticks-off a judge more than flying in the face of one of his orders. She'd end-up awaiting trial in a federal pre-trial lock-up if someone could just catch her.