Explosive investigation by NewYork Times into Axact : The company behind BOL

[FunkyGen]

Ab Inka Kiya Ho Ga ........

View attachment 222932

career pe dhabba
even if they escape this
every tv channel gonna be like
FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAK FUK FUKC UFKC UAKFUCKKKKKKK

 

[ZeusMK]

Axact employees often follow up aggressively with previous customers, pushing them to buy more. Some pose as American officials, badgering clients to spend thousands of dollars on State Department authentication letters. Payments are funneled through offshore firms.
Such certificates, which help a degree to be recognized abroad, can be lawfully purchased in the United States for less than $100. But in Middle Eastern countries, Axact officials sell the documents — some of them forged, others secured under false pretenses — for thousands of dollars each.

“They would threaten the customers, telling them that their degrees would be useless if they didn’t pay up,” said a former sales agent who left Axact in 2013.

Axact tailors its websites to appeal to customers in its principal markets, including the United States and oil-rich Persian Gulf countries. One Saudi man spent over $400,000 on fake degrees and associated certificates, said Mr. Jamshaid, the former employee.

Usually the sums are less startling, but still substantial.

One Egyptian man paid $12,000 last year for a doctorate in engineering technology from Nixon University and a certificate signed by Mr. Kerry. He acknowledged breaking ethical boundaries: His professional background was in advertising, he said in a phone interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid potential legal trouble.

But he was certain the documents were real. “I really thought this was coming from America,” he said. “It had so many foreigner stamps. It was so impressive.”



Last May, Mohan, a junior accountant at a construction firm in Abu Dhabi, paid $3,300 for what he believed was going to be an 18-month online master’s program in business administration at the Axact-owned Grant Town University.

A sales agent assured Mohan, a 39-year-old Indian citizen who asked to be identified only by part of his name, of a quality education. Instead, he received a cheap tablet computer in the mail — it featured a school logo but no education applications or coursework — followed by a series of insistent demands for more money.

AdvertiWhen a phone caller who identified himself as an American Embassy official railed at Mohan for his lack of an English-language qualification, he agreed to pay $7,500 to the Global Institute of English Language Training Certification, an Axact-run website.

In a second call weeks later, the man pressed Mohan to buy a State Department authentication certificate signed by Mr. Kerry. Mohan charged $7,500 more to his credit card.

Then in September a different man called, this time claiming to represent the United Arab Emirates government. If Mohan failed to legalize his degree locally, the man warned, he faced possible deportation. Panicking, Mohan spoke to his sales agent at Axact and agreed to pay $18,000 in installments.

By October, he was $30,000 in debt and sinking into depression. He had stopped sending money to his parents in India, and hid his worries from his wife, who had just given birth.

“She kept asking why I was so tense,” said Mohan during a recent interview near his home in Abu Dhabi. “But I couldn’t say it to anyone.”

Chasing Bill Gates

In Pakistan, Mr. Shaikh, Axact’s chief executive, portrays himself as a self-made tycoon of sweeping ambition with a passion for charity.

Growing up in a one-room house, he said in a speech posted on the company’s website, his goal was to become “the richest man on the planet, even richer than Bill Gates.” At gala company events he describes Axact, which he founded in 1997, as a global software leader. His corporate logo — a circular design with a soaring eagle — bears a striking resemblance to the American presidential seal.

Unusual for a software entrepreneur, Mr. Shaikh does not habitually use email or a cellphone, said several people recruited to his new station, Bol.

But his ambition is undimmed: Last year he announced plans for Gal Axact, a futuristic headquarters building with its own monorail system and space for 20,000 employees. His philanthropic vision, meanwhile, has a populist streak that resonates with many Pakistanis’ frustrations with their government.

As well as promising to educate 10 million children, Mr. Shaikh last year started a project to help resolve small civil disputes — a pointed snub to the country’s sclerotic justice system — and vowed to pump billions of dollars into Pakistan’s economy.

Photo

Barkley University claims that its degrees are recognized all over the world.
“There is no power in the universe that can prevent us from realizing this dream,” he declared in the speech.

But some employees, despite the good salaries and perks they enjoyed, became disillusioned by the true nature of Axact’s business.

During three months working in the internal audit department last year, monitoring customer phone calls, Mr. Jamshaid grew dismayed by what he heard: customers being cajoled into spending tens of thousands of dollars, and tearful demands for refunds that were refused.

“I had a gut feeling that it was not right,” he said.

In October, Mr. Jamshaid quit Axact and moved to the United Arab Emirates, taking with him internal records of 22 individual customer payments totaling over $600,000.


Mr. Jamshaid has since contacted most of those customers, offering to use his knowledge of Axact’s internal protocols to obtain refunds. Several spurned his approach, seeing it as a fresh effort to defraud them. But a few, including Mohan, accepted his offer.

After weeks of fraught negotiations, Axact refunded Mohan $31,300 last fall.

The Indian accountant found some satisfaction, but mostly felt chastened and embarrassed.

“I was a fool,” he said, shaking his head. “It could have ruined me.”

Deception and Threats

Axact’s role in the diploma mill industry was nearly exposed in 2009 when an American woman in Michigan, angry that her online high school diploma had proved useless, sued two Axact-owned websites, Belford High School and Belford University.

The case quickly expanded into a class-action lawsuit with an estimated 30,000 American claimants. Their lawyer, Thomas H. Howlett, said in an interview that he found “hundreds of stories of people who have been genuinely tricked,” including Ms. Lauber, who joined the suit after it was established.

But instead of Axact, the defendant who stepped forward was Salem Kureshi, a Pakistani who claimed to be running the websites from his apartment. Over three years of hearings, his only appearance was in a video deposition from a dimly lit room in Karachi, during which he was barely identifiable. An associate who also testified by video, under the name “John Smith,” wore sunglasses.

Mr. Kureshi’s legal fees of over $400,000 were paid to his American lawyers through cash transfers from different currency exchange stores in Dubai, court documents show. Recently a reporter was unable to find his given address in Karachi.

Photo

A broadcast studio at Bol, a television and newspaper group owned by Axact that is scheduled to start this year. CreditSara Farid for The New York Times
“We were dealing with an elusive and illusory defendant,” said Mr. Howlett, the lawyer for the plaintiffs.

In his testimony, Mr. Kureshi denied any links to Axact, even though mailboxes operated by the Belford schools listed the company’s headquarters as their forwarding address.

The lawsuit ended in 2012 when a federal judge ordered Mr. Kureshi and Belford to pay $22.7 million in damages. None of the damages have been paid, Mr. Howlett said.

Today, Belford is still open for business, using a slightly different website address. Former Axact employees say that during their inductions into the company, the two schools were held out as prized brands.

Axact does have regular software activities, mainly in website design and smartphone applications, former employees say. Another business unit, employing about 100 people, writes term papers on demand for college students.

But the employees say those units are outstripped by its diploma business, which as far back as 2006 was already earning Axact around $4,000 a day, according to a former software engineer who helped build several sites. Current revenues are at least 30 times higher, by several estimates, and are funneled through companies registered in places like Dubai, Belize and the British Virgin Islands.

Axact has brandished legal threats to dissuade reporters, rivals and critics. Under pressure from Axact, a major British paper, The Mail on Sunday, withdrew an article from the Internet in 2006. Later, using an apparently fictitious law firm, the company faced down a consumer rights group in Botswana that had criticized Axact-run Headway University.

AIt has also petitioned a court in the United States, bringing a lawsuit in 2007 against an American company that is a competitor in the essay-writing business, Student Network Resources, and that had called Axact a “foreign scam site.” The American company countersued and was awarded $700,000, but no damages have been paid, the company’s lawyer said.

In his interview with The New York Times in 2013, Axact’s chief executive, Mr. Shaikh, acknowledged that the company had faced criticism in the media and on the Internet in Britain, the United States and Pakistan, and noted that Axact had frequently issued a robust legal response.

“We have picked up everything, we have gone to the courts,” he said. “Lies cannot flourish like that.”

Mr. Shaikh said that the money for Axact’s new media venture, Bol, would “come from our own funds.”

With so much money at stake, and such considerable effort to shield its interests, one mystery is why Axact is ready to risk it all on a high-profile foray into the media business. Bol has already caused a stir in Pakistan by poaching star talent from rival organizations, often by offering unusually high salaries.

Mr. Shaikh says he is motivated by patriotism: Bol will “show the positive and accurate image of Pakistan,” he said last year. He may also be betting that the new operation will buy him influence and political sway.

In any event, Axact’s business model faces few threats within Pakistan, where it does not promote its degrees.

When reporters for The Times contacted 12 Axact-run education websites on Friday, asking about their relationship to Axact and the Karachi office, sales representatives variously claimed to be based in the United States, denied any connection to Axact or hung up immediately.

“This is a university, my friend,” said one representative when asked about Axact. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/w...t-reaps-millions-columbiana-barkley.html?_r=0

What the fricken fish!

 

[FunkyGen]

https://twitter.com/x/status/600636864140193792

Man, these guys know how to play the game....
But what can a van wala do?
Call his boss? "Sir, they've sent me water bottles, mission aborted!"
Boss be like "Same as you and your pay "

 

[TankMan]

career pe dhabba
even if they escape this
every tv channel gonna be like
FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAK FUK FUKC UFKC UAKFUCKKKKKKK

The big anchors will easily escape this and get jobs,the real problems will be for the junior anchors and newscasters etc.

 

[FunkyGen]

The big anchors will easily escape this and get away with it,the real problems will be for the junior anchors and newscasters etc.

yep kamran khan has already started giving his defences saying he'll leave the group if this that...
jusnior anchors.... hmmm.... my father always says... putta thara (your group) nai chaddi da

 

[Kolachi Punjabi]

yep kamran khan has already started giving his defences saying he'll leave the group if this that...
jusnior anchors.... hmmm.... my father always says... putta thara (your group) nai chaddi da

Look you're so naive, believing the new yorm times like its the gospel, anti state elements are string their pants now cause the Pakistani army is now going to change the propaganda war

 

[MM_Haider]

Only one thing:

FIA is utterly incompetent and politicized. Why were they sleeping before?

 

[kaonalpha]

WHAT NO BODY NOTED WAS "SOME NEWS PAPER SAYS AXACT IS ENGAGED IN FORGERY . THE ENTIRE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT GOES CRAZY. WHEN SOME LOCAL NEWS SAYS IT THEY BE LIKE HAHAHAHA HEHEHEEH.

PLUS AMERICANS ARE LEADING THE FORGERY RACE HAVE WE FORGOTTEN THAT.
NOW Every media group is running it like tape recorder 24/7

 

[Musafir117]

The big anchors will easily escape this and get jobs,the real problems will be for the junior anchors and newscasters etc.

But rumors was that Bol is " belong to Bolne wale"

 

[mr.robot]

Another update in the situation. BOL TV is getting ready to launch on 1st Ramzan.
BOL TV Network is launching on 1st Ramzan

 

[trainer]

 

[shah1398]

so we believe the NYT at first instance rather than first investigating and finding out if they are even right?if we start believing everything that appears in NYT then by that definition we no longer even exist.

 

[Al Bhatti]

How many politicians, law makers and government officials have degrees from this institution?

 

[TankMan]

Shoaib Shaikh was on Moeed Pirzada's program today.. bahut hi ziyada dramebaaz admi hai.

 

[pakdefender]

innocent until proven guilty , the allegation has been made by a persona non grata journalist of the New York Times so right now it's an allegation which will remain an allegation until proven otherwise.