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Twenty-two teachers are involved in a multimillion-rand fraud. Provincial education department officials have taken advantage of an offer of amnesty in return for information on the ringleaders. All the teachers would face criminal charges as the amnesty was only for the departmental disciplinary process.

The Department of Education has launched a website which features a list of 6,900 academic institutions accredited by an accrediting agency or state approval agency. The website is designed to help employers distinguish between accredited institutions of higher education and unaccredited institutions commonly as "diploma mills" that offer bogus degrees.

The rector of the Moscow State University of Culture and the Arts is alleged to have handed out 130 "false" law degrees between 2001 and 2004 in exchange for bribes worth RUR300,000. Estimates of how much students pay teachers and academics in bribes every year range from RUR250m to RUR300m.

La Salle University, a religious degree-granting correspondence university, was shut down by the FBI for issuing falsely accredited degree in 1996. Due to the fraud, the students were notified personally or through advertisements that they could receive restitution from the over $ 10 million seized from La Salle. However, due to a bad computer system it is still possible that some students were left out.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.