Former employees reveal Axact fake degree scandal details to NYT
May 23, 2015
In another article for the paper, journalist Declan Walsh writes that over a dozen former employees of the company have come forward. The article mentions 22-year-old communications student Sikander Riaz who worked at Axact and was tasked with selling degrees from Harvey University and Nixon University from the company’s Islamabad office.
Sikander Riaz who used the pseudonym Hank Moody told the NYT that “our punch line was that we used to give customers a degree in 10 to 15 days”.
Another former employee said he felt bad about the people he ripped off. This former employee who the article identifies as Ahmad said he averaged sales of $500,000 per quarter on behalf of fake high schools. According to Ahmad by the time he left, Axact was taking in $80,000 to $100,000 a day.
Ahmad tells the NYT that several of his early customers were young Americans who wanted a high school diploma so they could enlist in the Army to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Former employees further said that Axact uses at least 20 offshore companies to process customer revenues, pay suppliers and purposefully create a shield between Axact and the financial affairs of its websites. The article says that one such company Connect Shift registered in Cyprus lists Mr. Shoaib Shaikh as its chief executive.
The NYT claims that Axact has left traces in the US which include mailboxes in California, Colorado and Texas, and two Bank of America accounts in Florida.
According to the NYT, Axact’s main financial and logistical hub outside Pakistan is Dubai where its holding company Axact FZ is located.
Walsh also writes in the past few days the company’s array of fake online universities and high schools has gone silent. ‘In calls and text messages to 111 websites identified as operated by Axaxct, A New York Times reporter was unable to establish contact with a single sales agent’.
Walsh releases some court documents, images and clippings related to NYT Axact investigation
1.Disgruntled American students of two major fake degree mills, Belford High School and Belford University, brought a class-action lawsuit in an American court in 2009. It ended three years later with a $22.7m judgment against the schools. During the hearings, a Karachi man named Salem Kureshi claimed to be the owner of the schools and denied any link to Axact. But these two documents — registration documents for the schools’ mailboxes in Texas and California – show that their mail was being forwarded to Axact’s Karachi headquarters.
2.The Texas mailbox was opened by a Karachi man named Syed Asim Hashmi. This internal Axact publication, published four years later in 2010, lists him on page 19 as a former employee.
3.Screen grabs from the video testimony of Salem Kureshi and his associate “John Smith”.
4.Screen grab from Google Maps of the address given by the bogus accreditation body, International Accreditation Organization.
5. Copy of article by technology journalist Molouk Ba-Isa in the Arab News, dated October 6 2009, that identifies Axact’s Karachi office as the source of fake degrees being posted abroad via Dubai. The article was later pulled from the Internet following a legal threat from Axact’s lawyers, although never formally retracted. Distributed here with Ms. Ba-Isa’s permission.
