142: Axact
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Okay, we're recording, but so i'm going to call my dad because he's going on about something in emails. And I just have to like clarify what in the world is happening. No, hey, dad has going in A D.

C.

Oh, no. I'm back now.

fantastic. Yeah, listen, I was trying .

to get um I couldn't I couldn't quite make IT out. Understand what IT is you talked about in these mails. So I wanted to call you to get clarification.

My email.

Yes, so, so you bought you, you bought A T, V in mexico. Explain the stories to me.

I was in mexico, yeah, when I was ready to leave too. I say, teenagers say, hey, you wanna buy seventy five in television? I said, no.

Said only sixty five hour and I said, sixty five. I said, open the box. I looked in there was something in there.

I said, for sixty five, you got ta Carry IT to my car. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So they brought in to the car, drove at all.

I set up in the living room plug in. IT was so clear and viBrant. And then I noticed that he was the menu for K, F C.

Well, so is like, you turn the screen, like you like that the channel IT .

was on was in A T V. IT was the menu from A K F C.

So the K, F, C has screens, has like tvs that are menu. The TV is a menu. So you sure wasn't just on the no.

What was that? No, if I was just the driver menu for K, F C. Anya T V.

我 来 的。 So IT was just like a light with a, with a, like a plastic piece in front of IT.

Yeah, but I was very clear, viBrant chicken three piece for peace.

我 你说的 玫瑰花 的。

Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. Wasn't A T. V. But the good thing is I put IT on the street to get rid of hold IT.

So you you put that on the, you put that on the street for the trash truck .

and not for anybody to pick IT up, like to try somebody might want.

And you put like a sign .

on IT or something like that free. Yeah, I said free, but was on the street. And then the fourth day I put for a sale twenty five dollars, and somebody stole IT. Then then.

These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm jack recited. This is dark net diaries.

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This episode is sponsored by delete me. I hope dark and diaries has taught you something about how people can use your data against you. But what do you do once your data is out there? Because IT feels impossible to try to take IT off the internet, how are you meant to fight these massive data brokers who are selling your info? Well, you could try out the service called delete me.

Delete me does all the hard work of constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet. Data brokers hate delete me because your personal profile is no longer there to sell, and then delete me will tell you what they found and where they found IT and what they managed to remove. I tried IT, and they immediately got busy scarring the internet for my name and gave me reports on what they found on me. And then they got busy deleting things for me. It's great to have someone on my team when IT comes to my privacy, take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for delete me now at a special discount for the dark tt dari listeners today get twenty percent off you delete me plan when you go to join delete me dotcom flash dark net diaries and use promotion de D D 2 check out the only way to get twenty percent off is to go to join delete me dot com size dark net dies and enter code D D 2 at that's join delete me dot com sah darkness dies code dd twenty。 How is going?

Hello, hello, jack.

it's nice meeting you. ounds. I know it's.

it's crazy, isn't IT listen, I don't want my voice to be used if it's okay.

Yeah, sure. Of course I want use your voice. Okay, let listen.

Come closer. Come closer. This is a forbidden interview. The powers that we do not want this guy telling you his story. So I gotta do my part and keep him a secret, but I want to tell you the story. So bad.

So what you heard there was a voice sector, and he's just gonna reading the transcript for you of the interview I did with him. But the other thing is that i've got to conceal this guy's name. So we just gna make up a name and call him for all, meet for all OK.

Some background about me. I'm from pakistan. Actually I won't in a call center for us would .

answer the phones all day in a call center, he said the computer, but his had set on and wait for a call. And when when we'd come in, he'd see on the screen what company's person is calling about, and he would handle customer support for a handful of different companies. Customers would ask about their account to a trouble with their service because he knew english and could speak clearly. He was pretty good to doing this calls in a work.

There was a group of us, we were all friends working that, but we saw this other company had a whole bunch of openings for call centre employees. Exact xx .

website says there a leader in I T. globally. And IT looks like it's a very impressive company. I mean, you've got a recruiting video here. Let's take a list to this.

a few organizations nationwide that has a very defined leadership development program and structure career, but each and every employed exact is able to travel depot to reach the highest levels in the organization. They had all buildings all over kari slam blaha. And you know, they had one of the biggest transport fleets as well.

So they were big and we were excited. They were like good money and opportunity. We were tired of our call center anyway. So you know, IT was time .

a whole group of them applied to work at exact, and they all got the job. IT was a much Better place than where they were used to. They were in a six story building, and the pay was much Better.

We started working in the mean hub in kati. Now the way this call centre would work is we would do customer support for whatever client we would have. My first client was university in manchester, england, and this was a little different than what I was used to.

He was answering calls, helping students out with the stuff they needed. But IT was also commission based. Basically, he'd be sitting around waiting for a following. And if somebody were to call and ask about like a program at the school, he was supposed to try to get them to sign up for classes. And if he could, he'd get some .

extra money from making the sale. The commission was very small, and not many people would even call that were interested. So the paid for this university was not very good.

But inside the call centre was a leader board. In fact, IT would show you this leader board. Every time you locked into the computer, you could see how much money everyone in the call centre was making.

And some people were making surely great money, like insane amounts, hundreds of thousands. And you could see who their customers were, other universities, and they were very possessive of their clients. Like one day, another team was very busy, and one of the calls rolled over to me, and that was for their university.

I answered IT. And immediately someone came running over to me and said, no, no, no, no transfer that call to me. We have decided. So I never got a chance to get any good sales from other universities.

This all talk to his boss and was like, how can these other teams are making so much more money than I am? Is there way that I can get a Better client or something? So boss says, ah you know where there is something here um we have a brand new clients just came on board and they are called a bay no the no a bay city universe yeah base city university that sounds good.

Um there is the same kind of thing that you've been doing. You've got to help students with their online classes, but you can also earn some commissions. And there's some big potential here.

You're interested but also like, sure. So they brought him over to this account. Bay city university. No, bay town university. Yeah.

that sounds Better. They assigned this account to our whole group. IT was strange. A few people on our team were webmasters, developers, a fewer marketers, and then the rest of us were called workers.

The webmasters got to work at creating the university's website by town university 点 com。 IT said. We've got scholarships of robust allum nine network student aid, and the school was ranked number four in the country. Come, take classes and get a great career at public universities.

They made this website in a couple of days. IT looks really good. IT looks just as good as any other fancy university out there.

IT had a list. Of course, you could take a whole portal for students to log in and take classes remotely. Even in fact, we had to do training so they could show us how to help students take their online courses. And they set up courses using canvas, which a lot of schools use canvas, actually, but they showed us how to help students take classes.

IT took a couple of weeks to fully integrate this university and get everyone trained up on IT. Then, for all, started getting emails and calls from students interested in signing up. Basically, people were asking about classes, and he had to try to get them to enroll.

And if he could, he'd get a commission. Hi, can you tell me about your teaching degree? Um you call that the perfect time.

Yes, of course I can. We have one of the best schools in the country. Our professors all come from the highest rated universities, and our students typically go on to make great money after getting their degree.

We also have an accelerated program where you can earn your degree fairly quickly. And did I mention that because our online, one of the cheapest schools around, the sooner we can get you enrolled, the sooner we can get your degree. Our next classes are starting up in two days.

If we can get you signed up in the next twenty four hours, we can get you rolled in this semester's asses. Are you ready to get started? Always looking at this website and checked into IT and the school did not exist last month.

This university is brand knew there are no reviews about IT or people talking about IT. And he looked the address IT was the U. S.

Address and he typed into google maps. There's no building there. He was realizing this school doesn't exist.

This was something that exact created from thin air. There is no real university. There is no learning.

No classes. nothing. We were taking people's money and giving them fake degrees.

Did they know that was fake?

Maybe not. At first, since we had only a few classes, you could take a semester. So to them, IT might have felt like they were treating us. Because here's the thing, when you go on canvas to take the course, you can just hit next on every lesson to finish the whole course in minutes, so they would get done with all the courses like twenty minutes for the semester and feel like where the suckers for not making them go through the properly. That's an .

interesting psychological trickle to set up the classes in a way that you could easily skip through the tail and just finish the whole course in a couple minutes. This may not seem like the students where the cheaters here, not the school, which kind of brings them in on this game even more, you know, to make IT feel like they are the ones gaming the school. Almost the web team did great work at building this university y's website.

They listed a bunch of accrediting bodies. And if you go on the crediting bodies websites, you see this school is approved. But the accrediting bodies were all made up to. They even went so far as to put on the website that the school is endorsed by senator john Carry, even though john kerry never actually endorsed.

They even made us fit personas on linton, which looks like we worked at this university. And so if you looked up the university of lincoln, you'd see all these employees there and faculty.

Now, this school website, besides IT being a scm, had another dark side to IT care checks out. So if a potential student was interested in going to school here, they could ask for more information about classes on the website, whatever. But to do that, the website would make the potential student create an account on the school website, and you'd create account on the site.

And I would ask you for things like your facebook profile, your twitter profile, your linton profile. And I mean, this is that so much of a stretch to ask? I mean, i've probably been on dozens of side side of asked me for my social media profiles you but then all this information has wrapped up and given to the to try to follow up and make the sale.

I don't think you understand all of IT was given to me all their information.

Yeah okay, then explain what you mean.

So when they had to make an account on this fake school site, they had to enter an an email address for the using name and make a password while tag password was stored in clear text and given to me.

oh, I see, that is creepy.

Yeah, I thought the same kind of creepy, but it's far worse than that. I was talking with someone from another team and they said, go to facebook or calm and try to log in with this email and password. And we were able to logged in to these people's .

facebook accounts. OK, that's not creepy. That's awful. So when you put your password into the school's website, they would just hand the password rites of us all, so he can do whatever he wanted with IT.

This is a really good reminder that when we log in somewhere, anywhere, we're giving our password to the APP or the website. I mean, we trust that they aren't looking at our password or storing IT in clear text. We d trust that their hash in IT or encysted in IT, so they can't see IT even if they wanted. But here's a clear example of what could go wrong if we trust a website. Too much exact employees could see the users passwords and try using those passwords on their social media accounts, see if they reused the password there, and they would sometimes be able to log in to facebook or linked in or even their email in boxes.

And the website had some kind of tracker on the user. I'm not sure how that worked. But if I were on the phone with them, I can see everything they are clicking in, hovering over.

okay. But why where exact employees even logging into people's facebook accounts at all?

Because what we were doing was building a profile on every new student. The more information we know about them, the easier IT is to sell them on the degree. So once we learn a lot details about them, weed called the men say, i'm not sure if you're interested in a business degree, but we have a big sale on them right now. And we knew very well that's exactly what they wanted to do.

This is the bunk pass with. This is fake university hacking in the students accounts and fake degrees. It's a scheme. It's a big, big game.

We haven't even got to step one yet. We also had a late generation team or maybe marketing team is called who would find potential students. What they did was made IT so that if anyone posted the resume on monster dot com or indeed dot com, the marketing team would pick that resume up and located to see if they would benefit from a degree from our university. I don't know how they were able to immediately see everyone's resume is, but we were sent a lot of resumes.

okay. And what would you do with that?

We then research that person, look for the social media profiles, try to find out their goals and ambitions, get to know them, then e mail or call them, and say something like A, I knew you're struggling to find work. I want to help you with that. And of course, i'd try to get them to enroll.

And you know why i've made accounts on his career websites before. And yeah, IT seems like the moment you apply for a job or post me, you finally get flooded with emails about jobs you're seeking. And it's extremely hard to unstick yourself from this relentless bridge of job opportunities.

It's almost like these sites have an active data breach or are selling your data as soon as you give IT on. Once I have planned for a job in two thousand eight and one of these job recruitment sites, and i'm still getting emails from people today, say we ve found the perfect job for me, we had step one. Yeah.

yeah, yeah. okay. Step one. We want the student to end rolla. So we offer them a cheap introductory rate, a few courses, maybe a few hundred dollars.

Where are these students typically in the world?

Like are they in pakistan? No, no, no. I never saw any pakistani students. We mostly targeted U S, U, K, sum of europe and a lot in the gulf states like saudi abia Jordan, you know, by U A, because a lot of people, that money was not a factor for them.

Didn't any of this feel wrong, like where you maybe were thinking twice about giving someone a fake degree?

IT wasn't this degrees. There were certifications we were offering and high school diplomas too. But yeah, I did feel like this wasn't right.

But exact charmed me to get me to not care. IT was really weird. Let me tell you, you ever see how google's offices are?

Yeah, I did. I did go to google office once, and I remember they had free food for the employees. There were free rides to work. There was a place you can get your haircut in the parking lot. They were given car washes in the parking.

We had all that too, but like, hundred times more than what google gives their employees. IT was nuts to begin with.

Exact officers had a kitchen with chefs to make you anything you wanted, free, of course, but they also partnered with the best restaurants in town so you could go to an internal website, order food from any of these restaurants, and they bring you the food right to your desk, and not just like in a paper sack, whatever food they brought you. IT was always done with a touch of class, served by a bottler on a nice metal trade. And they would come collect the dishes from you and bring you any drink you asked for.

So our food was taken care of why you were at work, but our food was taken care of at home too. In fact, they didn't want you to fast with anything outside the office. If you needed groceries, just tell them what you want and someone will deliberate to your home.

If your wife needed to see the doctor, someone would go to your house and pick her up and take her to the doctor, wait there with her and drive her home. In fact, they gave us two company cars that we could use however we wanted, and they would get you anything you asked for. Take IT for a concert or a cricket match, they'd get IT for you and even drive you there.

What was the crazy thing you saw that they offered?

Um oh, they had a yard you could use and let me tell you, in a country like pakistan, this was extremely rare to be able to have access to yard. They didn't seem to care expenses when I came to taking care of their employees doing.

man, and this is like a cream, please work now I wanna go .

work at exact no, no, no. Because they have you work every day, twenty nine days a month. That's what they required you to do.

You get one day of a month, and no matter what you think you need to do, like take your kid somewhere or give your mother a birthday gift, they do IT all for you. So you could really focus only on work. And that's all they wanted you to do, just work all the time. And with students all over the world, you would always be busy.

So did they pay? Well.

the pay wasn't really that good. The commission was one percent. So if you ve got someone to enroll and they paid three hundred dollars, you'd get three dollars. But because everything in your life is taken care of, IT felt like we were living very well.

Alright, so he told me, step one, are there more steps to this?

yes. okay. Stepped two. So you know, once you get them enrolled, they might be in a one or two year program to earn their degree.

And new courses are released every few months for them to finish. But now that they're enrolled, I can call them up and say, hey, listen, I knew you really itching to get done with school. I think I can talk to the dean and get more classes opened up earlier.

Is that something you're interested in? OK? But listen, what i'm going to be doing isn't easy. The dean doesn't like me doing this, and I need a good reason to do IT. So if I can exploit your classes so you can just take all the classes you need now, instead of waiting two years, would you be willing to pay three thousand dollars for that? And yeah, a lot of them were happy to hear they could finish their degree in just a week.

I mean, at this point, they had to know that this is not a real school or a real degree, right?

Will see the school website looked real like IT had accreditations listed. The website was approved by secretary of state john Carry. You know, when the U.

S. State department says this is an accredited school, you believe IT even though his signature was fake and he didn't actually approve IT. But yeah, I think some of them did. No, and they didn't care. They'd already paid a little and were convinced that was a real school, at least at the beginning.

So if they felt IT was real, then maybe they thought they could get away with, said they lighted that IT seem so real so they could believe IT and feel good about IT. So when we would send them the certificate or degree, we made IT all exciting and congratulate laty for them, even send them and ask them to take a picture of them wearing IT, holding up the certification so we can put IT on our website. And they.

okay, what kind of degrees are we talking about here?

Are that civil international degrees, ironic tics degrees, teaching degrees, you know, english language certificates, law degrees and a lot of high school diplomas? But we never had fake medical degrees. That was always off limits because someone could get hurt.

Now, office told me they never sold, think, medical degrees. I did find some evidence that nurses and the psychiatrists were buying degrees from this company. I mean, listen to this.

This is the cbc news out there in canada. And they tracked someone down using a fake degree. They ve got from exact we're starting our investigation with councillors treating serious medical conditions with fake degrees.

First stop meet offered 欧洲。 He treats adhd, anger management, depression, ptsd. The list goes on.

Have a lot of certificate. Oh, in speaking of those stories, what is going on here? Listen to this, etta says.

IT is concerned by the report that nearly a third of pakistan's civil pilots have been flying using what is called a fake licenses. I also was calling IT a serious laps. An oversight pakistan international airline says that was grounded about one hundred and fifty pilots and says the problem is .

industry wide. Yeah, I saw that means thirty two. It's unrelated to what we were doing.

We did not sell pilot licenses. And that story was in pakistan. And like I said, I never saw any pakistanis and ruling in these universities. And by the way, once we had one university going good and rolling, they would stand up another new university a few months later, because after a while, these things would be discovered as fake and we'd have to start all over. So IT was just good practice to always be building new universities, and they kept giving us new ones to control.

We're going to take an ad break here, but stay with us. There's more steps that he was gonna tell about. And I am really curious to see who's behind this horse. This episode is sponsored by gram mary.

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This is the head of the universe talking. My name is danny crane, and I serve an H. O.

For university. And you is an institution that prides itself on excEllence. And as such, we drive to continually improve ourselves. Can be a part of newsprint versy to saw the sky of excEllent.

Here's another one from drew month university, a fake university created by exact drew and was an awesome experience for me. I was able to earn my PHD and leadership and education administration. I had the best advisor and was able to acquire a lot of experience in the education administration field.

I am finishing my P. H. D. At dream university, and I expect to graduate this fall.

We had the steam of sales ents, but the other people on the team would pose as people who worked at the school. So if you wanted to speak to the dean or administration department, or professor or councillor, we had IT all set up to be able to have these rules. You can talk to .

anyone you like, okay? I think it's pretty shady to Normally lie your customers, make them think that the school is real, but also oppose as a teacher and act like an expert in your field and give students a bad education is one thing just to sell them a agree, but it's a whole other thing to like given a false sense of knowledge of anything. I just think that's a pretty dirty trick.

The marketing team was pretty good at drummed up new victims for this step. They would spend all of money on google ads, h hyper targeting certain degrees and regions, scraping resumes of job sites, targeting people on social media and running seo campaigns to get their school rent higher in the search results. How much do you think this company was making from all this.

right? Our team had a goal of two point four million dollars a month, and there were twenty three teams in the company. You could see the leader board and how well each team is doing.

So you you told me, step one and step two, are there more steps to this? Like I just imagine you could just keep ringing, repeating, start over um take that victim sell on another degree .

um there are more steps, yes but here's where he gets weird and you lose track of your steps. So lets say I had someone pay extra to get their degree quickly and we send them the degree well 了， we could go a lot of different directions from here. One might be to call them up and say there's been a mistake in the degree. You could just make up whatever you wanted at this point, like you might say sorry to inform you, but there's been an error. You didn't take all the courses you needed to earn this degree.

I'm sorry, but we have to revoke your degree and then try to sell them on more courses or you might tell them that their certification is expired and they need a new one once we told someone that degree wasn't valid until you get an authenticity certificate, which is signed by a senator and IT caused them extra seven thousand five hundred hundred dollars to get that. But people were taking this to extreme levels. The company just didn't care how you got money from these people, just get money from them any way you can.

So some office called the person and poses the local government and say something like so i'm calling from the government about your degree. Congratulations on your degree. But unfortunately, it's not valid in this country until you pay an importation fee of ten thousand dollars and we'd get people to peace. All these extra fees .

thing that's cold, dude.

yeah or another was that read called them posing as a cooter for a big company? We d interview them for a job, hire them but then say, no, you're missing this one qualification. You need to get an english speaking endorsement which are no way you can get one for five thousand dollars .

getting nothing and and you know it's the classic con game that once you get someone on the hook for a little bit of money, you can just keep upping IT and upping IT and IT works because that person has already gave you some money. We humans have this flaw in our Operating system regarding some costs. It's hard for us to break off of something that we've already poured a lot of money and time into to at disappoint.

These people have already spent thousands of dollars on their fake degree. And it's just from not alone that this whole thing becomes important to them that they don't want to lose IT. And since it's already cost some thousands are like OK, i'll pay a couple thousand more. And this called the sun cast policy. And it's crazy how effective ity is against us.

Oh, and remember when we got them to take a picture of themselves in the graduation gown, holding the degree we sometimes use that photo against them, and just try to scare them by acting like someone else. And you don't know who I am, but I know you bought a fake degree from the school. Pay me eight thousand dollars, or also show this photo to your boss.

And do you get straight up extorting people?

Yep, IT was bad. IT was really bad. But IT felt weird because exact claim to be the largest I T.

Provider and had these big buildings and a whole fleet of company vehicles. So everywhere you look, IT felt Normal. And okay.

My parents were proud of me for working in the big office building, you know, and having a bottler. Com brings his dinner at home from a five star restaurant. IT was very strange. So none only are .

people getting extraordinary exact, but these degrees were catching up with people. There was one guy who bought fake degree, and he got a job as a criminal forensic psychologist, and he used his degree to get the job. And then he worked on seven hundred cases, giving his expert advice on them.

Before they found out he had a fake degree, they arrested him through him in jail for that. And I think they had to reopen all those cases that he was an expert forensic psychologist on. And there was this olympic diving coach who got in trouble for using his fake degree to get a job as a diving coach at inDiana university.

There was one other thing that we might do with the person we are gaming. Sometimes we'd call them up to try to scan them, but they were just like, no way I knew i've been scammed. I paid all this money for a fake degree.

You can't scm me for any more. I'm on to you right? Well, in those cases, we would sometimes say, yeah, you know what you're right. We ask cammas, but hey, do you want in hit too? And what we do is set up a deal with that person to fund the money through them, where payments would go through them and they could keep some of IT.

Oh my god, another converting the victims into money meals. Okay, so a money meal is someone who accepts like stolen money from someone else and then sends that to scammer. This makes IT harder for banks and law enforcement to detect where stolen money is going.

And the money meal typically doesn't know that what they're doing is illegal. And the deal is that they can keep like a percent of the money coming through their bank account, and they do very little to earn this, just let the money come in and then right to check, to send to someone else. And so exactly how this whole system of moving money around to avoid detection and shut down, it's easy for big banks to recognize which bank accounts that might be connected to exact and just stop those transactions. But if they're constantly shifting the money and it's flowing all around, the big banks just can't detect this very easily.

To stop IT, the money would get funny through different accounts and would often end up in the account of a company in superior lava, you know, places that are a little more protected for this type of thing.

Honestly, I got a head added to this exact company. IT is really an impressive Operation that they had set up. I mean, thousands of employees and a lot of them being highly skilled IT workers building websites in doing all kinds of pretty advanced marketing. But also they got this business model just died in.

They figured out the perfect template to start a fake university kit victims, to come on to the sites and then sm amount of a ton of money, and then get that money fund through different meals and offshore accounts, and then to do IT all at scale, just hiring more and more and more, and doing this everyday, making their workers work twenty nine days a month. I mean, exact was growing leaps and bounds. And they were setting up hundreds of sites here.

Let me just list the a whole bunch of these sites for your real quake. There was the al arab university, Alfred high school, all mina university. Okay, this one's cut a wake pedia entry. Let me see what's going on here. Oh, mad.

So apparently they were selling like some law enforcement training, and apparently a bunch of cops had gotten some fake degrees or training from this website, and then got jobs based off their fake training and got in trouble for this. Gosh, I always reach me to see people in thord breaking the rules. You just shared my trust and like the system every time.

okay? So there's like so many of these sites, embark I university by view university, bay city university by town university, chapel university, columbia a university, fort Jones university, micro university, James harding university, pine hill university, western advances to central university. There's just so many just so so many of these.

It's like once they figured out the game, they just kept copying and pasting and expanding and maximizing profits. So who's master minding this whole thing? Who figured all this out? Well, exact was found by a guy named swab argument shake.

Yes, I met him. He would come to the office and meet with the top sales agents. And i'll tell you, he did not seem like, you know, shadier cami.

He appeared genuine and was influential at getting you to do great work. He never talked about all the phony things going on. He only said positive things, like how much of an impact we are making, giving people in education and its changing lives. And he encouraged this to achieve excEllence in our work. So I don't know if he was the main scheme here.

Okay, so this guy swab, not only started exact, but also started A T V network called ball B O L. Um just looking at the youtube channel, they show music, video OS, game shows, talk shows and news channels. Um they seem pretty popular.

The youtube channel has five millions subscribers, and the website says they have one hundred and fifty six channels in sixteen languages. But this is interesting, right? A guy whose running a fake degree scam is also controlling the press. He's got a lot of money and is pretty influential.

One thing about pakistan is if you have money, you have power, you can get away with doing things that others would be arrested for. Oh, and he was always saying about how he was donating to charities and setting up different things to help the people of pakistan. So a lot of people like .

him the exact website says swab has set up schools, food and shelter systems and health care systems all through his charitable giving, and he himself graduated from one of pakistan's most prestigious business universities. So he clearly has great business skills, but he's not the only one running this company. But i'm having a hard time finding a clear corporate structure showing exactly who's there.

And I just don't know how many executives were involved. And it's possible that one of the other executives made up this scheme and got this whole thing going and maybe swap just doesn't know that there is like a big gap going. I can I just I don't personally believe that theory that he wouldn't know that what's going on in his own company.

And one reason is because what happened in two thousand nine, all right. So in two thousand nine, a woman from mr. Got her online high school diploma from an exact school called belford high school.

And I guess he felt like they lie to her. SHE must have paid for classes and enrolled in the school. But when he got heard to school, realize that was fake, SHE sued exact, and that case got turned into a class action lawsuit.

There were thirty thousand people who were also listed in this lawsuit suing exact. The lawyer representing the victim said he heard hundreds of people give stories about how they felt like they were tricked by the scheme. So imagine being exact in this moment OK, thirty thousand people are suing you, and you need to represent yourself in court in the us.

So do you go? Do you go to court? No, no, no, no. exactly.

Does not want to show the court, because I would absolutely take the record matter what the outcome would be, right? But a defendant did show up to court. Some pakistani g name was heard.

Like he's not someone from their legal team or executive team. So what's he doing here in court? And what he got to say, slam spoke up in court.

He is like, okay, listen, IT was me who made the belfer high school website. I just made the whole thing up inside my apartment. Yeah, I can understand why people feel trick.

I'm sorry, i'm not affiliated ated with exact, but I was the one who made the thing. In fact, this guy slammed, didn't even go to court. He just phoned IT in.

He'd only did like a short video call from some demi let apartment and he said he was in karachi I pakistan at the time. Prosecuting lawyers like, no, no, no, that the mailbox for belford high school is the same male box for exact. And salam is like, yeah, that must have been a mistake.

I'm not connected to exactly at all. And yes, that's my mailbox and the judge was like. The judges like OK salm, you said you did IT so you're guilty and slam took the fall.

So in two thousand twelve, the court ordered him to pay twenty two point seven million dollars to the plaintives. What's the live? Just L, L, right out and disappeared.

He has been paid a sense of that since two thousand and twelve. And investigators tried to find them, but nobody came. He's hiding out somewhere in pakistan.

I got to to say that is a brilliant legal move, if that is the work of exact legal team, right, to just grabs some guy to, like, block your whole incoming lawsuit and then just makes the whole thing disappear. I mean, really, honestly, how s off for that? That is such a ridiculous move.

And IT works so effectively. Why does an everyone do that? I mean, if I ever get suit, i'm just going to grab someone to be like, hey, could you stay your jack?

And just like, take the blame, it's just so that's this simple, stupid tract worked like, why didn't the court see through this and be like, no, no, no, all on a second. Get exactly here. Now, this guy solem convinced the coding with him with have been for eying very hard.

This just a kid over this. Okay, a serious space. So at this point of the story, a new protagonist shows up.

His name is decline. Walsh, now, I reached out to decline, like at least three times I mailed him, him, I tweet. I even went through some of his friends, but no response.

The dude is mad, busy. And I don't blame for not responding, but at least I try right anyway IT tesn't matter, because he left a mark on this story and documented everything along the way decline. Walsh is a reporter for the new york times, and he was doing a bunch of stories in pakistan and saw this.

I was like, who hate a minute? There's something not right about this company, exact and investigated. In fact, he spent two years investigating the story.

He spoke with a bunch of people who worked at exact, and he talked to people who bought fake degrees from there. He even focus all the same guy you heard earlier. IT was really phenomenal orts.

What he did any published a really good article in the new york times exposing all the americans that exact was getting up to. And he found that exact had set ups over three hundred websites of fake schools, and like eighteen of them, were a crediting bodies, fake accrediting bodies. You know, the flight places that confirm a school think that's just like a lot of schools that is made up like so much workin into building this company.

yeah. Well, when decker's new york times article was published, IT ripped through pakistan. People were mad.

What's up with this? IT looks really bad for a pakistani company to be so scamming, you know so the F, I, A was like pakistan's FBI was like OK OK. We'll check in to IT.

We'll see if there's any fraud here. Meanwhile, exact lawyers are sending letters to the new york times like, hey, you're running lies about us. We don't like IT. It's baseless and we're going to pursue strict legal action against you.

But the fia was investigating exact and yeah, they found enough evidence to open a case what's more, as they really didn't like the kind of bullying behavior that they are trying to scm customers out of more money by threatened them and deceiving them. So the fia took action. They raided the offices of exact.

They just started grabbing everything once they got in their computers, documents, people. But absolutely none of the executives were around during the RAID, which is kinds suspicious. Like how did those executives known ough to come in the office that day? But the people they did grab, question them and just let go.

They found in the building next to exact is where they were printing all the fake degrees. They had printers there and fancy paper, everything, and they just took at all. And at this point, the timeline becomes very dizzy to me.

I tried my best till I get IT all sorted out. But it's it's fuzzy. There are some gaps, i'm sure. Um but i'll i'll do what I can to explain what I think happened but i've just let you know that story from here on out is kind of difficult to know exactly what happened.

So the F, I, A read the exact offices, right but they didn't arrest anyone well with the information they gathered from the RAID, they found enough evidence to put out a reforms for twenty three people, including the CEO. Shape, shape. I can't tell if any of them actually quite, or arrested, or if they turn themselves in, or did any jail time at all. I can even tell you who the twenty three people are that had a rest out for him. I'm assuming they were executives or people involved actually identity in an article that said tubes wife was one of the people with the restaurant, but hers was dismissed because they didn't have enough evidence on her.

But I did read that all twenty three people who did get a rest for rent or just I quickly released on bail so I don't know they did any jail time or just maybe a day two before leaving and during that F I, A investigation they found that guy salem, the guy who took the fall for the class action lawsuit a few years back, he admitted that exact had paid him to take the fall. In fact, when he was appearing on video in court, heeling acted like he was moving his lips and then some exact official was like off camera saying the things for him. And then they paid them two, one hundred and fifty dollars to go into hiding and disappear.

Well, the F. I, A was like, okay, we did. Are we gathered the evidence? We have rated the office. We arrested some folks court.

It's now on you to finish up and send them the documents that suggest that exact made hundreds of millions of dollars from their scams. They took money from over two hundred thousand people around the world. And this means that was one of the biggest scams of all time.

Stephen cold bear even joked about this here. Listen to this. That's right. The pakistani company act was selling fake college diplomas, which explains where bin laden got his degree in women studies.

Luckily, pakistani authorities arrested the exact CEO, charging him with illegal money transfers, forgery and fraud, no doubt who represent himself in court, I hear, is got like twenty law degrees. Life for one. I'm glad they caught the guy.

Charging people hundreds of thousands of dollars for fake degrees is appalling. I believe that fake college should be free. Fake college should be free. I crease, Steven. Fake college should always be free.

Now, before the sentence could be Carried out, this guy, judge memon, suddenly and out of the blue, acquitted all of the people who are accused, like some of the number was now at twenty seven people being accused. So swab and twenty six others just all had their charges dropped just by the judge, and they were free to go like you done. There was no explanation or everything that was just unreal.

But the pakistani courts like, hold on. Wait, what just happened? And they lived into this guy, judge memon, further, and they found that he accepted a bribe from swab for about eighteen thousand dollars to just acquit everyone.

What's the court found out about this bribe? They fired the judge and unequal ted old twenty seven people involved and reopen to all the cases. One guy was pretty unlucky in all this mr.

Had made. Uh, he was the vice president of exact, guess what? He was living in the U.

S. So the authorities rabbled ed up nab him and he played guilty a kid. No escape from the U.

S. Justice system. There is no one to like, put in front of is this guy. So he went to prison for like, a year and a half. In two thousand and eighteen, the pakistani sessions court found twenty three employees and executives guilty of impersonation, cheating and dishonesty, forgery and adding and abetting.

And the judges like, okay, I want to give you all your sentence now, but that there's this moment in court the judges like, where is everyone? None of the twenty three dependence showed up to their sensing hearing. 那 so judge like， well, that's rude.

I'm removing all your bail, and i'm calling for your arrest with no bail option this time. And then the court issued prison sentences for all twenty three people. I think the highest that someone got was seven years in prison, but collectively at all added up to twenty years present time.

On top of that, they're all fine, like a significant amount of rupees two. And also somewhere in here sa block control over bowl that T V studio he started um IT looks like the pakistan electronic media regulatory authority revoked the broadcasting line that ball had, I guess, until shapes stepped down or something. But then in twenty twenty three a different company came in boat ball.

So definitely out of his hands now. Okay, so that's that right? Twenty three people sense to prison for this pole.

Exact degree meal scan, you think exact would like shutter its business and the C. E, O would just faces punishment. Well, no, thanks for what I could tell. Even though you were sentenced in two thousand and eighteen, IT wasn't until twenty twenty three that he was arrested. And don't ask me how you managed to stay free all that time.

Like I said, the details here are just baffling to say the least, and I have a lot of questions, but apparently business went on as Normal in exact. And there's a video of the F, I, A arresting the CEO shape at the islam about airport. I'll try to describe the sea to you um sweep wearing like a black polo shirt.

Now be looking very calm and a little confused, but not struggling or yelling or anything. And they put them in ocular and they drive away kind of an event. And even after all that, there's still a lot of people on his side like the ball news station was saying things like he's being abducted.

We don't know where they took on and they're only arrest him because he supports immersion cn. And this whole arrest is a violation of freedom of speech. But you can guess, his arrest didn't IT last long.

I believe he only spent two days in jail and there was released. And all I can find is that he submitted documents to the F, I, A, who then let him go. Based off those documents. Are you? Are you still working there?

No, no, no. My wife, my wife was not happy with me being part of this and wanted me to quit. So I did. Yeah, I don't work there anymore. I've gone to work for a different tech company.

So yeah, that's where we stand today except looks to me that they're still in Operation and A C E O did not service prison sense and I guess is doing just fine out in the world. I guess what could be what could he be doing appealing the case either as possible? And maybe he just had some deals with people to like.

Don't like arrest them anymore, just like drop the K. I don't know. It's just too hard for me to cut through the noise to find answers of what's going on over there.

My guess is that with his wealth and power, he just has a lot of pole in that country. Politicians and government officials have been very vocal that they're on his side and who knows what they're doing to help him get out of all this mess? I have a feeling that this is not the last time we hear about exact, and i'm really curious what they get up to next.

A big thank you to for which is real name for saying the story with us if he was oh, and thanks to you. Can't joshi for doing the voice acting on this one? If you look up for a new shirt, I got your back, go to shop, dark night dies that com and check that out.

I think there are over fifty different shirt designs there, and I guarantee you're gonna find one you love, so please check out the shop. This episode was created by me, the tiktok tiger jacky sider son, designed by the Willy whisker Andrew mary weather. This episode was assembled by the strone perfumed red leger, mixing done by sound of the music, by the mysterious breakfast mater cylinder.

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