In 2017, former president of Microsoft China Tang Jun had his Ph.D. from Pacific Western University called into question. Investigators found that not only was Pacific Western an unaccredited institution, but that his diploma had cost him $2,595 intuition, and required no classroom instruction. A year later, legions of other high-ranking senior executives were, perhaps somewhat embarrassingly, caught up in widespread "degree scams"— dubious programmes offering enrollees credentials like Ph.D. certificates for minimal, if any, academic work. The practice of academic forgery, where degrees from unaccredited or fake institutions are sold to customers both witting and unwitting, has long been popular among unscrupulous students in China but is relatively new to the upper echelons of its business world.
Though not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, a quick scroll through Chinese search engine Baidu reveals how easy it is to buy counterfeit certificates from websites like diploma999 and buydocument.net on the mainland. A fake diploma from The University of Hong Kong, for instance, costs only $250 and allows users to customize everything from the watermark to the quality of the paper stock ("aged," "eggshell" or "cream" are all options).
Allen Ezell, co-author of the book Degree Mills: The Billion- Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas, says the scope of the industry can be enormous. “One of the largest counterfeit diploma operations we have seen was based in Shenzhen. They offered diplomas on about 1,000 U.S. schools,” he tells FORBES.
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