In May 2015, The New York Times journalist Declan Walsh did an exposé that shook the world but left me feeling happy, sad and vindicated, all at the same time.
Walsh’s damning report revealed how a secretive Pakistani software company with the motto of ‘winning and caring’ earned millions of dollars from selling fake qualifications globally.
The degrees had no true accreditation. The university campus existed only on the internet. The professors were paid actors.
The company behind this massive scam was called Axact and it was run by Shoaib Shaikh, a young man who portrayed himself as a self-made tycoon with a passion for charity and plans to educate 10 million children in Pakistan.
Shaikh operated Axact from the port city of Karachi and had over 2,000 people on its rolls.
Most of them were telephone sales agents working in shifts round the clock. Their main job was to pose as professors and counsellors of fictitious Western universities and manipulate those seeking a real education into signing up for expensive courses.
To boost profits, the agents would often follow up with ruses that included impersonating top American and UAE government officials to persuade customers to cough up money for authentication charges.
Declan Walsh took three months to put together the story after being tipped off by a whistleblower. I don’t want to take away anything from him. It was a great story. It led to Shoaib Shaikh’s arrest and got everyone from the FBI and Interpol excited.
It’s just that I had uncovered the racket nearly a year earlier. And I had done it in less than two weeks without anyone’s aid.
My report, published in Gulf News on 4 June 2014, details how hundreds of vice presidents and CEOs in the UAE had climbed the corporate ladder on the basis of academic credentials from universities that didn’t exist. All these online degree mills were run by Axact.
Sadly, my editor didn’t allow me to mention Axact’s name in our story. ‘What’s the point of uncovering a racket if we don’t tell readers who’s behind it,’ I argued. It was a wasted effort.
‘No name means no names,’ he growled at me from behind his thick-rimmed spectacles. ‘If you insist, I will kill the story. I don’t want any debate on this.’
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I stormed out of his room in disgust. As soon as our story went online, I shot out emails to senior journalists in India categorically mentioning Axact’s name and their fake universities uncovered by me. I hoped it would raise the antennae because my investigation suggested that Axact was backed by the notorious D Syndicate run from Pakistan by India’s most wanted gangster and international terrorist Dawood Ibrahim.
Here’s a verbatim reproduction of the email I sent on 6 June 2014, nearly eleven months before Walsh’s report in The New York Times:
The D company has found a new way to make money—selling degrees; and trust me it’s more lucrative than trafficking and smuggling put together.
Shockingly, several Indians are unwittingly filling up their coffers.
Visit any of the following links:
ww.edgebrookuniversity.com
http://www.experiencebasedgraduates.com/
www.affordabledegrees.com
www.midtownuniversity.com
They are all non-existent colleges offering college degrees based on life experiences. Prices range from $500 to $4000. Open any of them and go to the chat option and ask for a college degree.
We did a story today.
http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/education/online-fake-degrees-xpress-investigation-part-2-1.1342936
It has now emerged that all of these bogus universities—there are hundreds of them worldwide—are backed by the Pakistan-based company AXACT.
They have set up call centres where Brit-US educated Pakistan students masquerade as US professors in heavily accented English.
This is their main business … The annual turnover according to an insider is $500 million—The sad part is anywhere between 2,000–4,000 unsuspecting Indian job aspirants/students enrol for their bogus courses every day. (India is their biggest market in Asia), thus unknowingly funding the D empire.
I thought the journalists would jump at the story, but they ignored the lead.
I was tempted to embarrass them by resending my email with the link to the article of The New York Times. I didn’t do that. Not because I am a gentleman but because it would have been akin to the pot calling the kettle black.
Indian media weren’t the only ones who had a scoop and sat over it. We did that too.
Before reaching out to Walsh, Axact whistleblower and former employee Yasir Jamshed had visited the office of Gulf News thrice with incriminating evidence against the company.
Jamshed came looking for me but I was vacationing in India those days. Each time he came to the office, he was turned away by a junior Arab reporter who was sent to the reception to meet him.
‘She would listen to me intently and then ask, so what’s the story?’ Jamshed told me later as we sat at Tim Hortons in Sharjah’s Al Majaz Waterfront from midnight to dawn.
‘I got so frustrated by your newspaper’s response that I rang up the desk of The New York Times who heard me out. A few days later they flew Walsh into Dubai to meet me. The rest as they say… ’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said lamely.
Jamshed recalled the reaction at Axact’s office when my report came out in May 2014. ‘It rattled us because you named some of our most lucrative online mills. But why didn’t you mention our company? Did you not know it?’
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth.
Even without Axact’s name, our story had created shockwaves in the region.
As part of my investigation, I conducted a simple experiment. I went to LinkedIn and typed in its search box the names of the bogus universities + UAE + CEO + manager.
I found a deluge of profiles flaunting qualifications from these universities.
From vice presidents and CEOs to top managers, they were all there.
Many were unsuspecting victims. In fact, they didn’t know that their costly degrees weren’t even worth the paper they were printed on.
The realisation left them shattered. Many immediately pulled off their profiles from LinkedIn after our story came out. Others remained in denial.
This excerpt from Mazhar Farooqui’s book ‘The Maz Files: Scoops, Scams, and Showdowns’ has been published with permission from Westland Books.