There’s an old, but now fast growing degree mill industry doing an estimated $7 billion a year worldwide in fraudulent diplomas and transcripts.
, nearly a fourth of workers admitted to having fibbed on a resume about a college degree or credential), while ChatGPT has heightened concerns about how easy it is—and how much easier it might become—to cheat one’s way to a legitimate degree.
While no one can really know the size of the market, Ezell estimates that phony degree mills now do $7 billion a year in sales worldwide, with much of that market in the United States and the Middle East, particularly the Gulf region. “We work in higher education where degrees matter a lot, and you need not just one, but multiple degrees to get a full-time job now,” Eaton says. “When we found out anecdotally that there was no systematic practice for hiring managers to check the credentials of applicants, we were floored.”
Ezell’s FBI Dipscam team , investigated around 80 suspected diploma mills, dismantled more than 40 of them and obtained 21 convictions. The brazenness of the business always impressed him. His first investigation, in 1980, was of Southeastern University of Greenville, S.C., a degree mill run out of a tiny two-bedroom house.
Axact, which has always insisted it’s a legitimate business, did not reply to requests for comment. On its corporate website, it describes itself as one of the world’s leading information technology companies with 45,000 employees and associates, and says that it has moved most of its operations out of Pakistan—though it still lists an Islamabad address.
According to an FBI agent’s affidavit and other documents filed in federal court in Maryland, the nursing degree investigation began back in 2019 with a tip to the FBI: two men were creating phony transcripts and nursing certificates from a Northern Virginia for-profit nursing school—a school Virginia shut down in mid-2013 for multiple violations.
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