Diploma mills have been around for some time now. What is a diploma mill? That is where you are given a degree from an unaccredited college or university in exchange for a few hundred bucks. Sometimes you have to take a perfunctory test, or submit to a brief reading. Most often the degree is given for no other reason than “live experience” and the money the scam artists want you to part with. And it is a scam. Make no mistake.
When Corra Group receives an order for an education verification background check, and we see it is from a diploma mill, we notify the client right away that this is indeed a bogus diploma. It is not happy news for any client, but it saves embarrassing and potentially litigious circumstances.
In the latest go around with diploma mills, Ben Yap Chee Mun was sentenced to five and half years for running a fraudulent business school and issuing fake degrees. Fake degrees are quite prevalent with foreign job applicants, by the way. According to the Strait Times…”Yap would train employees to sell various degree programmes purportedly offered by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and one Brookes University. However, Brookes Business School was not authorised to offer RMIT programmes and Brookes University was in fact a sham institution set up by Yap.”
According the article, students paid between and average of $10 to $20 thousand, of which the “directors,” Yap’s sales people received somewhere between forty to sixty percent of the take. More profitable and your every day vertical marketing scheme.
