Diploma mill scandal: Walsh releases Axact investigation documents

Documents link IT company to two major fake degree mills

New York Times reporter Declan Walsh, whose expose uncovered Axact’s fake degree empire, has released documents pertaining to his investigations into the IT company’s dubious online college websites.

The documents were shared by Walsh using the online file sharing service Dropbox on Saturday. They include scans of registration documents for the mailboxes of Belford High School and Belford University in Texas and California, a copy of Axact’s internal publication, screen grabs from the school owner’s testimony, an image of the location listed as the address for the bogus International Accreditation Organisation and scans of an article in Arab News which linked Axact with fake degrees being sold abroad.



Walsh also shared a guide to the documents he uploaded online.

According to the guide, disgruntled American students of Belford High School and Belford University brought a class-action lawsuit in an American court in 2009 which ended three years later with a $22.7 million judgment against the schools.

“During the hearings, a Karachi man named Salem Kureshi claimed to be the owner of the schools and denied any link to Axact,” Walsh wrote in the guide. “But registration documents for the schools’ mailboxes in Texas and California show that the schools’ mail was being forwarded to Axact’s Karachi headquarters,” he added.

Walsh said the Texas mailbox was opened by a man from Karachi named Syed Asim Hashmi, who was listed as a former Axact employee on page 19 of the IT company’s 2010 publication ‘Axactian’. The internal magazine came out four years after Hashmi opened the Texas mailbox.

Screen grab from Google Maps of the address given by the bogus International Accreditation Organisation. PHOTO COURTESY: DECLAN WALSH

Meanwhile, the Arab News article, written by technology journalist Molouk Ba-Isa on October 6, 2009, identified Axact’s Karachi office as the source of fake degrees being posted abroad via Dubai. According to Walsh, the article was later pulled from the Internet following a legal threat from Axact’s lawyers, but never formally retracted.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 25^th, 2015.