Bogus diploma ring busted with help from U. of I. professor
Thousands of buyers may have participated in fake diploma scam
By Russell Working | Chicago Tribune reporter
12:41 AM CDT, August 4, 2008
The network of bogus universities was a family-run venture based in rural Washington state, but the criminal enterprise spanned the globe, with its operators allegedly paying bribes to Liberian officials and selling fake PhDs and MDs as far away as Iran.
They were busted by state and federal officials—among them a Secret Service investigator posing as a shadowy Syrian seeking a bogus chemistry degree—with the help of a local physics professor.
For the last four years, U. of I. at Urbana-Champaign professor and Fermilab physicist George Gollin helped unravel the scheme that has resulted in eight guilty pleas this year and could spark further charges against hundreds of people who may have bought and used bogus diplomas.
Dubbed Operation Gold Seal by federal investigators, the case exploded into the national news last week with the publication of the names of some 9,600 possible buyers of junk degrees from the phony "St. Regis University" and at least 120 affiliated institutions operated by Dixie and Steven Randock Sr.
Claims to advanced degrees from diploma mills and other unaccredited schools are burgeoning, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year as state and federal employees use phony credentials to bump up their salaries, Gollin said, citing estimates based on a number of sources, including the Justice Department.
In the Colbert, Wash.-based scam, buyers included people with U.S. government e-mail addresses—such as NASA and the military—and one man who reportedly works in the control room of a nuclear power plant in Wisconsin. At least five people on the list had e-mail addresses indicating they worked for one Chicago-area suburb.
The customers were based in 131 countries, and at least 140 of them reported Illinois addresses, federal investigators stated.
The scheme generated $7.3 million for the owners by selling degrees from phony institutions and unsuspecting real schools, including Chicago Technical College and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The list of possible buyers, first published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review and also obtained by the Tribune, includes names of people who may have inquired about the degrees but had not actually bought them or used them as an unfair boost in getting promotions, federal officials said. Because of this, the Tribune is not naming the individuals.
In any case, officials are marveling at the strange twists in a scheme worthy of a Graham Greene novel.
"It should be a movie," said Jack Zurlini, an assistant attorney general in Washington state.
"I mean, this one guy went to Liberia to bribe officials. Holy cow! You take your life in your hands to go there in the first place, and you're carrying sacks of money, and you're asking them to do these illegal things. And they did! It's just amazing."
The Liberian Embassy in Washington did not return a reporter's calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Gollin primarily researches technical issues relating to the design and utilization of the International Linear Collider. But he became the unlikely bulldog who latched onto the scam in 2004 when, irritated by the spam from diploma mills clogging his in-box, he began investigating and posting information about St. Regis and other diploma mills on the Web.
The owners had been paying Liberians to accredit them, even though they were located in the U.S., and they didn't take kindly to Gollin's meddling.
"The folks in Spokane, claiming to be Liberian diplomats, wrote to [the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign], threatening to sue me, threatening to sue the university," Gollin said. "The university really freaked about this, and we had a bit of a dust-up."
Officials in Washington began investigating the Randocks' operations when they were alerted that some teachers in Indiana had been claiming the bogus degrees. Zurlini soon learned that Gollin had amassed a great deal of information about the scheme.
"With his help, it became clear to us that it was a criminal enterprise," Zurlini said. "We had this huge data pool out there which is this intricate criminal enterprise, and he was able to make some sense out of it and connect the dots."
Degrees were sold in areas like oncology, dentistry and engineering, and some buyers reportedly worked for state and federal governments, according to the Spokane, Wash., U.S. attorney's office.
That office has distributed the list to federal agencies and state attorneys general around the country so they can decide whether to prosecute anyone.
"There are degrees in areas where you really don't want the practitioner to be incompetent because it would be dangerous," said Gollin, also a board member with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
It is a crime for federal employees to gain advantage in hiring and promotion by using phony degrees, said Thomas Rice, a senior assistant U.S. attorney in Spokane, whose office prosecuted the case.
In the St. Regis case, degrees may have been sold to people with e-mail addresses from NASA, the military, the Social Security Administration and the National Endowment for the Humanities, according to the list. All might potentially face federal charges, Rice said.
In one case, "We had to recuse ourselves because a deputy United States marshal obtained a degree and allegedly attempted to use it to get a promotion in this district, and he was prosecuted for that in this district," he said.
Gollin said that when he began, he had no idea how far the case would go.
"I was just trying to make information available so that someone would be able to tell that something like St. Regis was not a real school," he said. "And that they shouldn't go to a physician who bought one of the MDs at St. Regis."
rworking@tribune.com