Fake Degrees

LinkedIn is full of fake degrees. But we knew that, didn't we.

LinkedIn Is Filled with Fake Degrees | Motherboard

 

I was a bit disappointed to see so little actual substance in this article. We've been finding people on LinkedIn with degrees from bogus schools for quite a while.

Bogus degrees aren't new. People using bogus degrees aren't new. People using bogus degrees on LinkedIn is certainly not new.

It's a bit like writing an article about how the person you talk to on the internet might not actually be who they say they are. Yeah, true. And that was big news in 1997. Now? Not so much.

Still I think it represents an astounding amount of chutzpah to put a fake degree on LinkedIn. If ever there was a place where you are likely to get caught, that is probably it. No one needs to know your name, your company or even your job title. We can find you just by searching for your bogus degree.

But I've also run into a fair number of people who really just don't understand that Almeda wasn't legit. They think their degree is accredited. Well, technically, it is. But it's accredited by a bogus accrediting agency. So maybe these people just really think they found a successful life hack to bypassing the college scam. For some of them they'd probably have been able to knock through most of a bachelors at TESC all on their own. Some of these people are police officers with years of experience and stacks of training certificates. But they clicked on the first search result and took the cheapest path without doing their due diligence.

Honestly, if you're going to lie like this, why not just claim that you earned your degree from a legitimate school? Many employers don't check. Many schools have privacy rules that prohibit them from releasing information even if you have written consent from the alleged alumnus/alumnae.

It just seems to me that if you're going to go the dishonest route you should at least lie about a decent name in higher education.

 

Since I don't know if I want to continue for my Ph.D, I am looking for a shiny Doctorate degree for personally enrichment. I plan to have Kinko to print me a diploma with my own design.

University: International Online University (IOU)
College: Harvard Business College (HBC)
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration

hahaha

Seriously, why would people want to use FAKE degree?

 

I really cannot understand the thought process particularly in an age where we can find your school with a very quick google search.

Say I work in sales. And I got into the business before one needed a college degree. Now, I find myself running into closed doors because I don't have that piece of paper. Also assume I absolutely do not want to earn a degree legitimately because, well, whatever.

So, I have two choices. I can buy a degree for $199 from the first search engine result for "Quick, cheap degree." Benefits include the fact that they typically include transcript service and will verify my "degree" via the telephone. Granted, that's enough to breeze through many corporate background checks. Still, an article like this can expose you at a very inopportune time.

Second choice, grab some college out of the sky and say you have a degree from there. Heck, you can even do some research by contacting the school to verify the graduation of a fictitious alumnus just to get an idea. Find a school that gives the most favorable response or, better still, one that just plain refuses to verify via telephone and has a policy of letting students mark their record as "private" which they will never reveal no matter what sort of consent you have.

Get a certificate printed up online and call it a day. Pick an obscure school that you're unlikely to ever run into another graduate from and you should be good to go.

Nobody is going through LinkedIn verifying that all claimed graduates of Brooklyn College actually graduated. But you're sure to get picked up in a sweep with one of these diploma mill degrees.

I realize I may have just provided an outline for fraud. But, honestly, I'd rather people defraud me using an outright lie than the intermediary lie that these silly websites provide.

 

It is "DegreeInfo" after all, you simply added a "Fake" to the front of it.

You see it takes an HR mind to figure out how to outsmart HR.

 

What I don't understand are the people who continue to believe that if they buy a diploma from someone else, it's somehow more legitimate than if they simply printed their own. Do they really expect these fly-by-night organizations to still be around in a year or even 6 months to "verify" their "degree"?

Even the ambitious fakes that start websites purporting to be an actual school fade away pretty quickly; look at the well-known fakes of not too long ago like Glencullen, Shelbourne, Palmer's Green, Wexford, etc. They've all but disappeared from the Internet, besides some archived articles about fake degrees.

 

They "disappeared" because they were part of the same major fraud ring, which got caught and was shut down. That fraud - around 30 fake schools - was known as the UDP scheme - (University Degree Program) involving people in US, Cyprus, Israel and, IIRC, Romania. UDP was the scam that first piqued my interest in fake degrees. Back in the late 90s, a local guy who ran a computer shop in my town displayed his Master's from U. of Palmers Green. I knew instantly it was a fake, did some lookups on the Internet and some time later, ended up here. :smile:

One of the masterminds of UDP was a Boston rabbi, who, as I see it, should have had better things to do.

BTW - How did I know instantly the degree was fake? Because I once lived in Palmers Green (North London) - but that was a very long time ago - over 60 years. I lived on the main drag - Green Lanes, about two blocks along from where the "University's" maildrop appeared, many years later.

J.

 

I think in the majority of cases it represents an astounding amount of stupidity. No brains - no fear. Ergo, chutzpah unnecessary.

J.

 

And in the rest of cases, perhaps it's the all-too-common scenario of intelligent people doing stupid things. No cure for that, either.

J

 

My "favorite" fake university was Buxton University. It was the first time I encountered a diploma mill. I was in the Navy and a PO1 was trying to add it to his record in anticipation of the chief boards.

He swore it was a legit UK school. I checked it out. And thus this obsession began.

I'm sure countless members of the military were able to get unaccredited degrees added to their records just because the E-3 working the counter didn't know any better.

I've often wondered if any of them ever added these things to their SMART transcripts and were able to transfer the bogus credits to legitimate schools. Probably more of a long shot. Though Ichase a hard time believing someone, somewhere didn't slip through the cracks.

Heck, in the AIU thread I mentioned how I found one person with a BS from AIU and an MBA from Colorado Technical University.

 

Yeah - I saw that. Are you sure it wasn't from the other AIU - American Intercontinental University? That AIU is a Regionally Accredited distance school.

Easy to confuse.

J.

BTW - Buxton was also a UDP scam-school, along with Palmers Green, Brentwick, Glencullen etc...

 

Palmers Green: I remember well the phone call I once got from a really bewildered chap, who identified himself as with the office of Weights and Measures for Palmers Green, London. As one of the few "officials' there, he had been asked by higher ups to visit and vett the University of Palmers Green. "I deal with petrol pumps and grocery scales," he said. "I don't know anything about universities." Said he's tried to reach InterPol, but they wouldn't talk to him; had no interest.

LinkedIn: They remain the most accessible source to find lots of users of fakes. It used to be Monster.com, where you could (as ABC did) rent a one-month access to the entire 15 million or more resumes on file, searchable by key words. I started searching there for ABC, but stopped after finding 5,000 "juicy" fakes, including the head of the ethics committee for a major city police department, because they had more than enough to run with. Ended up doing 10 fake degree segments . . . and Monster.com was really annoyed, and changed their pricing and search policies dramatically. The next thing done for ABC was to search the 2 million names (appx.) and biographies in the 17 various editions of the Marquis Who's Who directories, many of which list the degrees of the lists.

What none of these methods -- Monster, LinkedIn, or Marquis -- catch, however, are the very large number of people using counterfeit diplomas from real schools, or simply listing degrees they never earned . . . not to mention the fake schools that use or used names also used by real schools, like LaSalle.

 

I once had a "favorite" fake university. I forget the name of the place, but you could backdate your degree to any year you wanted to. Mind you, I would never use a fake degree, even if I had one, I'd just buy it in order to prove how easy it is to get a milled degree.

 

High on my all-time favorites list is Bernadean University, which awarded you a certificate absolving you of all your sins, along with their degree.

 

A few years ago I had a prospective job candidate. Young kid fresh out of Cornell's College of Engineering. During the background check phase it came back that he never graduated (he said he graduated about 9 months before).

Turns out that he had, indeed, taken all of his coursework but did not complete the mandatory swim test. So, he finished his classes and left and assumed that his diploma was just late to arrive in the mail.

It was a tricky situation because he wasn't trying to deceive us and the problem was very easily corrected (he just had to drive back and pass the swim test).

I'm sure that the majority of people who claim to have earned a degree from a previously attended school were not so naive and are knowingly defrauding their employers. Perhaps some of them started out having said they merely "attended School X" and that, eventually, morphed into having graduated from school X.

But it's an interesting situation nonetheless.

At a SHRM event I asked some of my colleagues how they handle applicants whose education cannot be verified using outside services or internal checks. All of them said that they ask the candidate to bring in a copy of his/her diploma.

So, when the background check fails, they ask for the thing that's probably the most easily forged (compared to say, a transcript). And the reality is that the check itself becomes less important for certain candidates.

There are a lot of holes in system. And no consistent means of actually verifying a degree. We had briefly considered switching over the National Student Clearinghouse to verify degrees. The problem? It doesn't include NA schools.

 

One of my conclusions in my thesis is that they (HR) don't know and don't care. There's been nothing in the intervening years to cause one to consider moderating that perspective. I'm not at all surprised by your anecdote.

Problem? Or a feature? Hard to say.

 

My favourite "deal" goes back (I'm pretty sure) fifty-odd years. At that time, in my late teens IIRC, I read an article on degree mills in Reader's Digest. I forget the name of the school, but the best "deal" cited was a "university" that sent prospective customers a free B.A. to encourage enrollment for a Ph.D. :smile:

J.

 

Another of my favorite fake universities was Karma University, which put their students through past life regression therapy and awarded academic credit for all past life experiences.

 

I don't have any favourite mill, but I'll never forget the bloke who forged (very poorly) a degree from a US diploma mill.