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For years, a Romanian degree mill sold fake diplomas all over the world. Every moth $ 2 million had been transferred into a bank account in Cyprus. On the March 5, however, a joint action of US authorities (FTC) and British authorities shut down all the dozen-or-so websites. However it will probably not put them out of business since their main tools are Email spams and clever telemarketing.

Counterfeiters are reportedly finding ways to foil China's new electronic registration system for university diplomas. According to government statistics, 600,000 fake diplomas are circulating in China, although many officials suspect that the actual number is much higher.

Israel grants government workers 10 to 20% pay increases for every advanced degree they earn; and as a result, dozens of civil servants, including top education officials, have been put under investigation for obtaining fake degrees.

Japan. Kenya. Mexico. United Kingdom. USA: People from the Kenyan Ministry of Education participated in selling fake diplomas. In the USA and Mexico, students buy term papers and admissions essays online. People propose to take tests for others in China.

Corruption in admissions procedure, the sitting of exams and the allocation of scholarships is rampant in Chinese universities. One positive outcome of a recent plagiarism scandal is the design of a code of conduct for students and professors by Beijing's University.

Nepal's anticorruption commission says that tens of thousands of government employees, including teachers, police, and senior bureaucrats, have been using fake university degrees. The Commission for Investigation on Abuse of Authority says it suspects that 10 percent of the Himalayan kingdom's 140,000 schoolteachers are using diplomas purchased from India.

Diploma-mill owners are an elusive bunch. They flood e-mail boxes with offers of cheap college degrees, and collect payment through Web sites, then filter that money into overseas bank accounts. When the police try to shut one of the businesses down, the owners just set up shop elsewhere, often in a poor country with weak fraud laws. Unable to snuff out these illegal businesses, many states have changed their strategy: if you can't catch the dealers, go after the consumers. A handful, like Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, have recently criminalized the use of fake degrees.

Web-based bogus UK universities appear to be thriving despite the efforts of the authorities to shut them down. UK and US trading standards officials last year closed down 14 websites offering fake British degrees for up £1,000 each. The certificates, from 14 made-up institutions, were said to have been used by hundreds of unqualified people, mainly in North America, to gain jobs in areas such as teaching, computing and childcare.

Las fábricas de diplomas son universidades fantasmas que venden certificados académicos en lugar de proporcionar experiencia educativa. Cuando la Web GetEducated empezó a hacer un listado de los centros de formación a distancia en 1989, había menos de 50 centros abiertos al público. Hoy en día existen más de 750. GetEducated ha redactado una lista de 10 'señales de alarma' que ayuden a evitar adquirir un diploma universitario falso.

A school may demand that six teachers repay nearly $ 30,000 in pay raises they received after obtaining fake degrees from an online school.