More than 200,000 people from the Gulf bought fake university certificates from a fraudulent Pakistani company that allegedly made millions of dollars from the scam, according to one of its former employees.
The New York Times revealed last month that Karachi-based IT firm AXACT had run a fake business involving paid actors promoting fictitious universities and fake US State Department authentication certifications purporting to be signed by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
The company allegedly created websites involving so-called professors and students who were in fact paid actors and employees who would write fictitious reports about Axact “universities” on CNN iReport, a website for citizen journalism.
Former AXACT employee Sayyad Yasir Jamshaid blew the whistle on the four-year scam, leading to the arrest of AXACT CEO Shoaibh Shaikh and the collapse of his multi-billion dollar fake degree empire.
This week, Jamshaid told EXPRESS, part of Gulf News, that fake degrees were sold to at least 200,000 GCC residents.
He was quoted as saying: “Between 2011 and mid 2015, AXACT issued degrees and diplomas from 350 nonexistent universities to over 200,000 Middle East residents, mostly from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.”
He continued: “At AXACT’s 24/7 Karachi headquarters, we handled roughly 5,000 calls daily. Of them, 60 percent came from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
“As one of 110 quality assurance auditors, my job was to listen to the interactions between customers and sales agents. We had a software which filtered incoming calls from various countries. It was rendered useless as almost every second call I picked was from the Gulf.”
Another former AXACT employee, who was not named in the article, reportedly backed up Jamshaid’s claims. He said: “We were 900 plus agents working round the clock and attending nonstop calls from GCC countries for years, so one can well imagine how many degrees were sold in these places.”
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