The University of Johannesburg (UJ) is the first South African tertiary institution to use blockchain technology as an additional security measure to protect its certificates against alteration or falsification. The Director of Central Academic Administration calls on all tertiary institutions to collectively improve the integrity of their qualifications and enable companies to verify their qualifications easily and at no cost, which will help to prevent certificate fraud and curb counterfeiting.

A forger spotted in 2019 by the Ministry of Higher Education has been charged with forgery, counterfeiting and sale of official documents, fraud and money laundering. Since 2015, he had been selling fake diplomas by the thousands at €200 each. With the complicity of a taxi-ambulance driver who photographed patients' documents, he bought pre-paid cards under these false identities, which were then paid for by electronic transfers by the purchasers of the false diplomas via their own pre-paid cards.

Four abandoned buildings have made a Gwalior primary school teacher a millionaire. His permanently closed private nursing and education colleges allegedly sold bogus degrees to hundreds of students each year, without running courses or giving them practical training in hospitals. An investigation showed Gwalior has become a hub for issuing nursing degrees in cheap private colleges affiliated to state universities and accredited by the Nursing Council.

Nigeria’s National Universities Commission (NUC) had discovered fake institutions in Benin awarding PhD degrees after students completed bogus studies in less than one year. According to NUC, academic projects and theses were sold for about NGN3,000 (about US$7.32) per copy, and sexual harassment was prevalent. Many of these fraudulent institutions are run by Nigerian proprietors who target students from Nigeria, where public universities struggle to accommodate a high number of qualified students seeking admission.

Over 100 students at the private KIM University in Kigali, Rwanda, have not been allowed to graduate in July 2021 after authorities detected that they had altered their grades in the university system. According to the Rwanda Bureau of Investigation, the suspects are accused of electronically falsifying documents and could face sentences of five to seven years in prison and fines ranging from 3 to 5 million Rwandan francs (about US$5,000).

A former director and two former deputy directors of Dong Do University in Vietnam were prosecuted for issuing hundreds of fake degrees and illegally earning more than US$310,000. The indictment also points out that the Ministry of Education and Training failed to carry out its responsibilities in monitoring the implementation of regulations on university enrolment and training.

The Taiwanese startup, TuringChain offers educational institutions, students, and enterprises a new way of certification and authentication with the blockchain-powered solution TuringCerts. According to its CEO, a quarter of all data on LinkedIn is fake or exaggerated, while 27% of degrees can be bought online. TuringCerts’ creates an anti-counterfeit e-portfolio for students, and educational institutions receive a digital cache, which they can use to issue certificates.TuringCerts uses Smart Identification and protects digital certificates from manipulation.

As part of the government's crackdown on degree fraud, and to safeguard the international reputation of UK universities, 85 fake UK university websites have been shut down since 2015. Websites have also been found selling fake degree certificates from real universities: a BBC investigation in 2014 found a website selling the University of Kent for £500, which were described as for “novelty purposes, or as a replacement for lost diplomas”. Employers are encouraged to carefully vet the qualifications of any new employees as “The only way to stop these operators is to remove the demand”.