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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.

Police officers have collected "much new evidence" in the case of an alleged exam-selling ring at Rome's La Sapienza University, the largest university in Europe, the local newspaper Il Messagero reported last week. According to police officers, students paid fees ranging from $1,695 to $ 3,391, depending on the degree of difficulty, to receive oral-exam questions in advance from the faculty member who would test them.

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.

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.