Diploma mill fined $22.7 million in federal lawsuit

 lawsuit, which was originally brought against www.belfordhighschool.com by Flint native Carrie McCluskey, alleged that Belford High School takes students’ money by offering them an accredited high school diploma, but that Belford High School is not accredited by legitimate accreditation agencies and that the diplomas are not valid. “Getting a GED can really help you start your life,” McCluskey, told the Flint Journal after filing her lawsuit in November 2009. “People who want to give you fake ones are saying they don’t care where your life will go. They’re just out for your money.” “I’ve known for a long time that Belford was completely fake,” said George Gollin, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a former elected official on the Board of Directors for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. “I would think that there are close to 200,000 fake degrees being sold every year, with the majority of those – at least 100,000 – coming in the U.S.” Gollin has worked for years with retired FBI agent Allen Ezell and John Bear, an authority on distance education, as part of a watchdog group that helps bust up what he calls “diploma mills and scams by con artists.” Ezell, an FBI agent for 35 years, co-authored the book Degree Mills: The Billion-dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas and for 11 years was the head of the FBI’s DipScam task force charged with disbanding diploma mills. MLive states that Belford High School and Belford University was ordered to pay $22,783,500. The ruling, which reflected the approximate price of each diploma sold ($249 each), times the 30,500 U.S. students who purchased diplomas from Belford between 2003 and the time of the lawsuit, and multiplied by three, pursuant to damages associated with Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations violations. Diploma Mills on the increase The second annual Accredibase™ Report for 2011 revealed a 48 percent increase worldwide in the number of known fake diploma mills, and the number of what the report describes as “largely online entities whose degrees are worthless due to the lack of valid accreditation and recognition” is likely to increase in the coming year as desperate job applicants knowingly – and unknowingly – do business with companies that offer fake degrees and false credentials for a price. Accredibase identified approximately 5,000 suspect educational institutions and accreditors, with more than 2,600 confirmed diploma mills and more than 2,000 suspect institutions currently under investigation for inclusion in the database. For more information on diploma mills and effective background screening, get in touch with us today.]]>