200,000 Axact fake degrees sold in Gulf countries

Not hundreds or a few thousand, but over a staggering 200,000 people from the Gulf countries bought fake online degrees and diplomas from dubious Pakistani IT firm Axact in the past four years, writes Mazhar Farooqui for XPRESS.

This shocking revelation comes from former Axact staff member-turned-whistleblower Sayyad Yasir Jamshaid, the key figure in The New York Times story. “At Axact’s 24/7 Karachi headquarters, we handled roughly 5,000 calls daily… Of them 60% came from the UAE and Saudi Arabia,” Jamshaid told XPRESS in a freewheeling interview. “As one of the 110 quality assurance auditors, my job was to listen to the interactions between customers and sales agents. We had software which filtered incoming calls from various countries. It was rendered useless as almost every second call I picked was from the Gulf.

"Between 2011 and mid-2015, Axact issued degrees and diplomas from 350 non-existent universities to over 200,000 Middle East residents, mostly from the UAE and Saudi Arabia,” said the Pakistani. XPRESS cannot verify Jamshaid’s claim but independent investigations and conversations with Axact sales agents in Pakistan show he may not be off the mark.
Full report on the XPRESS site