Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has ordered an inquiry into a U.S. media report alleging that a Karachi-based company is earning tens of millions of dollars a year by selling fake academic degrees online.
The Interior Ministry made the announcement on May 19, a day after The New York Times reported that the firm, called Axact, had set up a network of hundreds of websites for fictitious schools with names like Columbiana and Barkley, in reference to the prestigious U.S. universities of Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley.
The report analyzed websites of fake universities and quoted former employees and clients from the United States, Britain, and the United Arab Emirates who had paid up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for their degrees.
Axact condemned the report as “baseless, substandard, maligning, defamatory."
