Degrees of Deception
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2018
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An investigation into one of the world’s biggest degree mills, a Pakistani company, that has sold over 200,000 bogus qualifications. IT company Axact has created hundreds of websites purporting to be online universities offering a range of academic qualifications from degrees to doctorates. However while a degree can cost just a few thousand dollars this BBC investigation has discovered customers are also being blackmailed for buying them and some have paid over more than $500,000.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Simon Cox and this week's assignment here on the BBC World Service exposes one of the world's biggest fake degree companies. |
| 0:10.0 | I am a natural bone con man I am one of the most feared one of the most respected one of the most notorious |
| 0:19.0 | This modest salesman is a whistleblower on the run. He moves frequently, |
| 0:24.1 | his only solace the cigarettes he chain smokes. We speak to him late at night on the |
| 0:29.2 | phone, he won't say from where. |
| 0:31.2 | I am a marked man. |
| 0:34.0 | I have a bounty of $10,000 on my head right now. |
| 0:38.0 | Because of this, we're using an actor to re voice his words. We're calling him |
| 0:45.9 | Mohammed. For over a decade he was part of a complex scam selling fake degrees to |
| 0:52.0 | tens of thousands of people around the world from a |
| 0:54.7 | company in Pakistan called Exact. |
| 0:57.8 | Exact, World's Leading IT Company, in 1997. It started from a one-room office. The |
| 1:06.5 | mission of exact, which acts like a guiding light for the exactions, can be |
| 1:11.8 | simply put into two words, winning and caring. |
| 1:16.0 | Winning was what Mohammed did as a top exact salesman with a lavish lifestyle. |
| 1:22.0 | I was given a driver, I was given vacations, I had a company paid mobile phone, |
| 1:27.0 | I was being given alcohol and women on the company's payroll. |
| 1:31.0 | The company made its money selling fake qualifications. |
| 1:34.0 | Former FBI agent Alan Azle is an expert in bogus degree companies |
| 1:39.0 | and he watched Exact become a huge global firm. |
| 1:43.2 | They've got money and wire transfers going around |
| 1:45.8 | that you wouldn't believe. |
... |
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