A family member is in the hospital or a nursing home. How can you know if the registered nurse or licensed practical nurse who is providing bedside care is properly trained? The Federal Department unveiled criminal conspiracy and wire fraud allegations against 25 people in January in connection with the $114 million sale of 7,600 bogus certificates from three now-defunct Southern Florida nursing schools. The certificates allowed untrained people to take the national nursing board exams, and at least 2,800 of them passed.
As a result, phony nurses were working in places ranging from Texas nursing homes to a New Jersey assisted living facility to a New York business that cared for homebound pediatric patients. As a result of “Operation Nightingale,” the Veterans Administration was forced to terminate 89 phony-degreed nurses engaging in direct patient care. (According to the VA, no actual patient injury has been discovered.) State licensing boards are also scrambling—Delaware has revoked 26 working nurses’ licenses, Georgia has ordered 22 to surrender their certificates, and Washington state is investigating 150 applicants with forged credentials.
In recent months, Republican Congressman George Santos’ lies have drawn attention to the problem of fraudulent degree claims (nearly a fourth of workers admitted to lying on a resume about a college degree or credential in a survey last year), while ChatGPT has raised concerns about how easy it is—and how much easier it may become—to cheat one’s way to a legitimate degree.
Now, the nursing credential scandal and a new scholarly study are shining a light on another overlooked and rapidly rising educational fraud problem: counterfeit degree mills. Fake Degrees and Fraudulent Credentials in Higher Education, edited by three Canadian academics, contends that academic integrity scholars have paid far too little attention to fake degrees, which are “just as important, if not more important, than other forms of academic fraud,” such as cheating and plagiarism.
Moreover, there is so little scientific study on degree mills that the Canadian editors sought advice from Allen Ezell, an 81-year-old retired FBI agent with 65 degrees, only one of which is legitimate—an associate’s degree in accounting from Strayer University. Ezell spent the final 11 years of his 31-year FBI career leading Operation Diploma Scam (Dipscam), before resigning at the end of 1991 to work in corporate fraud investigations at a large bank, and then “retiring” again in 2010 to research, publish, and lecture about diploma mills.
While no one can truly know the extent of the market, Ezell thinks that phony degree mills now generate $7 billion in revenue worldwide, with the majority of that revenue coming from the United States and the Middle East, particularly the Gulf region. He estimates that this has increased from $1 billion in 2004, attributable to the internet, the desire to teach more adults online, and the Covid-19 period transition to online education for college-aged pupils.
According to the book, the United States has long been a hotbed for false diplomas due to its emphasis on educational degrees, decentralized system of accrediting schools, and relatively open market in education. For decades, House and Senate committees have held hearings on the issue, but none have resulted in legislative solutions.
In separate interviews with Forbes, Ezell and one of the Canadian book editors, Sarah Eaton, a University of Calgary professor and academic integrity expert, described how governments devote too little effort to shutting down diploma mills and hiring managers, including at universities themselves, do too little to check for fake degrees—whether from mills or fraudulent claims of degrees from legitimate universities (a la George Santos).
“We work in higher education, where degrees are really important, and you need numerous degrees to get a full-time job now,” Eaton explains. “We were astounded to learn anecdotally that there was no systematic method for hiring managers to evaluate the qualifications of applicants.”
Importantly, the United States does not explicitly prohibit promoting, granting, or possessing forged degrees, though prosecutors have pursued various schemes using broad criminal provisions such as wire and mail fraud. “There’s a law against people who have a fake passport, so why not against people who have a phony degree?” Eaton wonders.
Eaton and Ezell make no apologies for the difficulty of cracking down on mills or weeding out bogus degree holders. According to Eaton, developing a complete blacklist of fraudulent schools or diploma mills would be impossible since the fraudsters may readily change their names, internet domains, and other information to avoid being included on such lists.
Instead, she advises employers to consult with a respectable education agency—in the United States, the Department of Education has a list of current and formerly authorized and legal colleges and universities. Ezell cites Oregon, where the Office of Degree Authorization (ODA) is required by law to protect students, businesses, and licensing boards by accumulating information on accredited institutions, analyzing transcripts from unaccredited programs, and giving information on degree mills.
“There’s a law against people holding a fake passport, so why not against holding a fake degree?”
According to Eaton’s book, the terms “diploma mill” and “degree mill” are often used too broadly by the media and those in higher education to describe low-quality, for-profit schools that leave graduates with comparatively worthless credentials—the type of schools that the government has attempted to debar from receiving federal student loans. It doesn’t make them bogus degree mills, which provide no classes, demand no effort, and are frequently only available online.
According to Ezell, the 64 bogus bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees he possesses were gained using money, sometimes false claims of “life experience,” and “truly not doing any work.” The most work he ever performed for a phony degree was a four-page master’s paper. He could have spit the paper out using ChatGPT today, perhaps.
Ezell’s FBI Dipscam squad (which disbanded when he retired) investigated around 80 suspected diploma mills, disassembled more than 40 of them, and got 21 convictions. He was constantly fascinated by the business’s audacity. In 1980, he conducted his first inquiry into Southeastern University in Greenville, South Carolina, a degree mill run out of a tiny two-bedroom cottage. The proprietor actually welcomed Ezell and another agent who had also purchased a degree from him to visit his establishment, where he displayed student records, false diplomas, seals, and ribbons that the FBI would later take in a raid.
The proprietor committed suicide on the night of the raid, and when the FBI reviewed his records, it discovered that 171 of Southeastern’s 620 “graduates” were employed by federal, state, or local governments—evidence that it’s not just private businesses or universities that have been lax in checking degrees.
In comparison to some of today’s internet-enabled companies, Southeastern was a little fry. Axact, a 25-year-old Pakistan-based organization that offers transcripts and bogus degrees ranging from high school diplomas to PhDs, is the largest and most prominent diploma mill Ezell has investigated. Despite a 2015 New York Times exposé, followed by criminal charges in the United States and Pakistan, Axact is still operational.
In its 2016 prosecution of an Axact executive operating in the United States, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York stated that Axact had received $140 million from tens of thousands of clients through bank accounts in the United States.
According to Ezell, Axact continues to operate behind dozens of school names and web sites that are “nothing but layers and layers of flypaper,” catching both students seeking a legitimate online degree and those searching for a scam. California Imperial University, for example, boasts its “Joe Biden Scholarship Program” and purports to be accredited by the American Higher Education Commission, complete with a red, white, and blue logo. (No, that is not a legitimate accreditor.)
According to Ezell, the impact goes beyond phony degrees. He claims that Axact staff blackmailed several degree holders, asking additional money so that they would not be exposed. “Now that they have all this knowledge about you, you’re in a position to be extorted, blackmailed, threatened with publicity, arrest, deportation—to the point of suicide,” Ezell added. “We’ve seen single victims give up to $1.4 million.”
Axact, which has always maintained that it is a real company, did not respond to calls for comment. It describes itself on its corporate website as one of the world’s premier information technology businesses, with 45,000 workers and affiliates, and claims to have shifted the majority of its operations out of Pakistan—though it still has an Islamabad address.
The nursing degree investigation began 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, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit and other documents filed in federal court in Maryland.
The failed school was owned by one of the men, Virginian Musa Bangura, and in 2015 the pair began selling phony diplomas and transcripts (showing both clinical training and courses in anatomy, pharmacology, and the like) for $6,000 to $18,000 a set, backdating them to before the school lost its license. (Both men pleaded guilty to wire fraud last year.)
Nurses in the United States must complete an approved one to four year LPN or RN nursing program that includes both classroom and hands-on training, pass the national exam, and meet any additional state licensing requirements. The Nursing Licensure Compact now has 36 states participating, allowing nurses licensed in one jurisdiction to practice in another. State regulators face challenges as a result of the fragmentation.
For example, Maryland does not permit for-profit schools but does let graduates of for-profit colleges in other jurisdictions; 111 graduates of the Virginia mill were licensed by Maryland prior to the implementation of new fraud measures in 2018.
In 2018, Maryland resident Patrick Nwaokwu, the second individual involved in the Virginia school plan, began working with Johanah Napoleon, a Florida mill operator who had purchased the for-profit Palm Beach School of Nursing in 2016. Florida closed the school in 2017 due to a low number of pupils passing national tests, but gave the school until December 2019 to graduate current students.
Napoleon, Nwaokwu, and others took advantage of the opportunity to begin selling backdated and phony Palm Beach diplomas and transcripts—typically $17,000 for an RN degree and $10,000 for an LPN degree. They charged extra costs to have someone take New York State’s mandated online infection control course.
According to an FBI affidavit, 1,226 “graduates” of the Palm Beach institution applied for licenses in New York, with 369 actually being licensed. What makes New York so special? It does not limit the number of times a candidate can take and fail the national exam, and once they have a New York license, nurses can apply for other jobs.
Nursing school owner Napoleon admitted to personally obtaining at least $3.2 million through the selling of false nursing school documents when she pleaded guilty last November to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. She has yet to be punished because she is cooperating in the larger Southern Florida investigation, which resulted in fresh charges being filed against 25 people in January. The probe, according to the administration, is ongoing.