From the issue dated February 7, 2003
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On the Web, It's Easy to Earn Straight A'sColleges face uphill battle in fight against sites selling fraudulent transcriptsBy ANDREA L. FOSTER Want a Harvard diploma? How about a University of Virginia transcript? For a few hundred dollars you can have either one -- or any other phony
The site asks you to pick the college you want "authentic looking" credentials from, along with the desired degree, campus address, major, and grade-point average. Sending a MoneyGram is fine; you can also pay via bank transfer to an account at Hansabank, in Estonia. Sites offering fake college documents are all over the Web, and legal experts say it's a business that the victimized institutions themselves can do little to stop. College administrators are worried about the potential for fraud, whether perpetrated by schemers who flash phony degrees to get jobs, or by those who submit made-up transcripts to gain admission to graduate programs. The forgery of academic records is nothing new, but the explosion of Web sites selling fake degrees has made the problem markedly worse. As a result, at least two states, Illinois and North Dakota, are considering legislation that would make it a misdemeanor to peddle false academic credentials to secure a job or promotion, or to gain admission to college. The University of Southern California is pushing state lawmakers to introduce similar legislation there. Meanwhile, college administrators are working to reduce the trafficking in phony documents by helping institutions send transcripts from one campus to another electronically, rather than through the mail. That way, the colleges are all but guaranteed that the student records they receive are genuine. About 600 institutions are already using a server at the University of Texas at Austin to send and receive transcripts nationwide, says Scott Burgy, lead systems analyst at California State University at Bakersfield. He is chairman of a group at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Business Officers that is working to standardize the electronic transmission of student documents. "Within the profession we all recognize that even ... the most conscientious of us have been fooled at one time or another," says Peggy C. Askins, director of academic records and registrar at Oklahoma Baptist University. "About all we can do is fight it as hard as we can, but recognize that occasionally we're going to get blindsided." Custom-Made Degrees One of the best ways registrars and employers can guard against receiving phony transcripts, says Ms. Askins, is to require them to be sent directly from higher-education institutions, whether electronically or via regular mail. For the most part, American colleges follow that practice. But many colleges in developing countries let graduates assume responsibility for forwarding their transcripts. Ms. Askins was the editor of Misrepresentation in the Marketplace and Beyond: Ethics Under Siege, a book published in 1996 by the registrars' association. Since then, she says, it's been "more of the same." But the Internet has made ordering a custom-made degree easier than ever. Another site, BoxFreeConcepts.com, trumpets: "Create a transcript! Create a recommendation letter! Hell, create your own college!" Cooldegree.com advertises that it will verify to prospective employers who call a toll-free number that an individual graduated from a college on a certain date with a particular degree. And Fakedegrees.com allows customers to specify the university crests or embossed seals to be added to diplomas. Bob D. Lucas, owner of BoxFreeConcepts.com, calls it "strictly a humor site." But Mr. Lucas, who lives in Richmond, Va., acknowledges that some customers may try to use his documents to get a job or apply to graduate school. "We can't control everything," he says. Jeffrey Tabler, service manager of Cooldegree.com, says his site does not sell documents from real colleges: "Our products are purely for novelty and entertainment purposes only." Efforts to get comments from the operators of the other Web sites mentioned in this article were to no avail. But these products are obviously being used to fake out colleges, and the wide availability of desktop publishing, scanning technology, and color printers has made it easy for any savvy computer user to create authentic-looking transcripts. "You don't cut and paste with scissors. You cut and paste electronically," says Joe E. Orndorff, president of Scrip-Safe, a company in Loveland, Ohio, that manufactures paper for college transcripts. A swindler can scan a registrar's signature onto paper and make it look like a transcript, he notes. A color ink-jet printer can be used to mimic the lettering of a legitimate institution. Scrip-Safe treats its paper, he adds, so that when a document is photocopied, the name of the college and the words "copy" or "void" blanket the copy, to prevent its being altered into a forgery. Mr. Orndorff surveyed about 50 colleges in 1999 to find out how often employers who called colleges to verify someone's credentials discovered that they were phony. He estimates that at least half a million people a year lie to employers about having graduated from or attended college. "It's a horrendous problem, and we're all suffering from it," says Maxine L. McCarty, a senior evaluator of foreign academic credentials for the International Education Research Foundation, in Culver City, Calif. The foundation promotes the enrollment of foreign students in American colleges. Producers of falsified diplomas and transcripts can figure out the tricks of the trade by going to academic conferences and collecting real academic documents, she adds. In fact, many of the Web sites selling counterfeit transcripts borrow the same techniques that legitimate printers of transcripts use to protect the authenticity of their products. The counterfeiters advertise that their documents are made with special paper and contain holograms, bar codes, or watermarks. For example, a site called College Diploma Reproductions says, "We use a graphic designer, professional printing techniques with expensive lithograph and thermograph equipment to print your order individually." Admissions officers say many fake transcripts are presented by foreign students who are seeking entry to competitive graduate programs in the United States (The Chronicle, November 1). Documents from China and India tend to arouse the most suspicion, says Todd E. Colvard, associate director for international admissions at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. To avoid being duped, the university requires entering foreign students who themselves sent academic records as part of their admissions applications to bring their original transcripts with them to the institution. If they don't have the originals, they are given a semester to present them or face being sent home. "We look at the stamp, the seal, the signature, the paper and printing, and compare them with formats that we have in our reference books that say what the documents should look like," says Mr. Colvard. He estimates that about 1 percent of the roughly 1,750 admissions applications his office receives every year either include phony or doctored academic records, or omit records that show poor grades. David I. Meyer, senior associate dean for graduate studies at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles, says China's ministry of education ought to press universities in China to send transcripts to other institutions, rather than let students handle the documents themselves. In June he sent a message to American medical colleges, informing them of a Chinese student whose acceptance to UCLA's medical school had been withdrawn after the school discovered that the student's transcript and recommendation letters were falsified. "We are tentatively concluding that other applicants, and yes, even current and former students submitted forged transcripts, some going back as far as 1992," his message read. Allen Ezell, who investigated diploma mills for the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the advent of the Internet, says he recently identified about 20 Internet sites that offer to create fake transcripts from established colleges. "I'm surprised at just how worldwide it is," he says. He did the research in preparation for a discussion he will lead at the annual meeting of the registrars' association, in April. Mr. Ezell, who left the FBI in 1991, now investigates corporate fraud for Wachovia Corporation, a financial-services company. Elusive Operators The FBI no longer investigates diploma mills. William Carter, a bureau spokesman, says the cases "were very difficult to prosecute." Finding Web-site operators in order to prosecute them or file civil charges can be difficult precisely because many of them are located overseas, says Martin Michaelson, a Washington lawyer. Few, if any, of the sites provide contact names, addresses, or telephone numbers. The Chronicle spent $505 to receive a fake Harvard diploma and transcript from BackAlleyPress.com that was sent from Thailand. The Web site says the printing is done by the Shun Luen Company Ltd., of Shenzhen, China. Payment was deposited in the Estonian bank. Colleges that do manage to contact the operators often make veiled or overt accusations that the Web sites are infringing on the institutions' trademarks, and demand that the proprietors remove the names and seals from their sites. But such demands, even if honored, don't necessarily keep the operators from continuing to manufacture fake diplomas and transcripts. Laws and regulations on the books would let most state attorneys general and consumer-protection agencies crack down on Web-site operators for engaging in fraudulent business practices, but the authorities rarely act. "There hasn't been, on a national basis, a huge outcry about it," Mr. Michaelson says. The Web sites often include declarations that the records they sell are merely "novelty" items. At BackAlleyPress.com, a legal disclaimer pops up before a viewer can purchase phony documents. The notice says the products "are meant as gag gifts and intended exclusively for personal enjoyment, amusement and entertainment." It also says they are not to be used for job or academic applications. But whether such a disclaimer offers legal protection for the site's operators depends on several factors, including whether BackAlleyPress.com documents would easily deceive someone, says Mr. Michaelson. 'Victimless Crimes'? Last August, chief information officers at several colleges sent e-mail messages to Fakedegrees.com, asking it to "cease and desist" from using their institutions' names and logos on its site. Nonetheless, Fakedegrees.com tells visitors that they can request diplomas from any institution, which could include diplomas from institutions that sent the cease-and-desist notices. St. Norbert College was one of the institutions that wrote to Fakedegrees.com. The college's message also demanded that the site remove its link to St. Norbert's Web site. Within 30 minutes of the message's being sent, Fakedegrees.com had done so, says John L. Beck, director of computer services at the college. The University of the Incarnate Word, in Texas, reported similar results. Kenneth L. Servis, dean of academic records and registrar at the University of Southern California, says he tried but failed to get the local police to prosecute someone who presented false USC documents to an employer. "The general response from the police department is that these are victimless crimes, and there are no clear statutes about this," he says. He notes that when employers call and ask him to verify whether job applicants have graduated from the university, many candidates are found to be lying, although he has not kept track of how many. Mr. Servis wants state legislators to make it illegal for people to make false claims about their academic credentials to secure a job or promotion. But Kristen Soares, the university's lobbyist, says the California Legislature is overwhelmed with the state's budget deficit and is not assigning the issue a high priority. Nor has she been able to enlist the support of the University of California or California State University. Two other states are closer to considering legislation that would make it a crime to use fake college documents. The Illinois Board of Higher Education voted unanimously last April to ask the legislature to pass a bill that would make it a misdemeanor to use a fake diploma or transcript to secure a job or promotion or gain admission to an Illinois college. The bill also makes it illegal to produce a phony diploma. Lawmakers may consider the legislation this year, says Don Sevener, a spokesman for the Board of Education. The North Dakota House of Representatives approved a similar bill last month. The bill is now before the State Senate. But such state actions are uncommon. And with law-enforcement agencies doing little to combat the problem, many colleges are resorting to transmitting academic records electronically. "It's really not that expensive," says Bakersfield's Mr. Burgy. "It's getting the word out there." REAL OR PHONY? Some questions that college registrars should ask in evaluating the authenticity of a student transcript:
SOURCES: Allen Ezell and the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 22, Page A25
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education