Inside a Network of Fake College Websites

Interesting article by Inside Higher Ed.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2025/08/14/inside-network-fake-college-websites

 

It feels like the resources it takes to extract $200 here, $3000 there, exceeds the amount of effort. But maybe I'm underestimating the volume here.

 

Would be easy to crush them all if universities spend like .001% of their sports budget on such matters.

 

Those are all Axact sites.

 

I assumed it was Axact at first, but I thought they were in Pakistan and these individuals seem to be in Panama.

 

Oh, you know, in the old days, about 20 years ago, Axact's sites were hosted on US servers but registered to someone with a fake name (quite often the names of famous Pakistani cricket players) in Room 202, Block 2, Almas Heights, Karachi, Pakistan. Later, it was US servers, GoDaddy, and the address was 15111 North Hayden Road, Scottsdale, Arizona. After that, many of the sites were hosted on Dutch servers for a couple of years, and nowadays it's mainly Russian servers, with hosting companies providing what is referred to as bulletproof hosting.

Axact is a Pakistan based company, but this doesn't mean they don't use services overseas. Of the many bank accounts used by Axact for payment for degrees, at least 50 were/are in US banks. And many subsidiary companies are registered elsewhere. People who bought degrees from some Axact schools a few years back made their payments through a company called GESFWA, Global Education Support Forum for Working Adults, conveniently registered in Cyprus and to Shoaib Ahmad Shaikh, the CEO of Axact. https://cyprusregistry.com/companies/HE/285810

 

Of course, "Boston Coast University" caught my eye, so I checked out their website.

The listed address (280 Back Street) isn't really a street at all, and has no numbers attached to it, it's a narrow back alley that runs parallel to Storrow Drive along the Charles River and Esplanade. A large portion of it is parallel to Bay State Road, and (interestingly) runs behind multiple brownstones, with Bay State Road addresses, owned and used as offices and student housing by Boston (non-Coast) University, the real one on Commonwealth Avenue.

 

Axact has sold an estimated 9 million degrees but the money doesn't come from that alone.

First, there's the purchase of a degree. The customer is often offered a discount or a "scholarship", many of the more recent sites offer the Joe Biden Scholarship Program.

Then comes the upsell: a while after the purchase of the degree, the customer is contacted by an Axact salesperson, offering an upgrade to a more "prestigious" university.

If the customer turns down the offer, the extortion begins. The salesperson will tell the customer that unless he/she pays a fee, they will pass on information to the authorities in the customers home country that he/she has bought a degree from a fictitious university. Sometimes customers are forced to pay for "legalisation" of the documents. Individual victims have lost millions this way.

 

Not so easy with Axact, since the company appears to have full support from the judiciary and the ISI, the secret service in Pakistan.