College Degree Spam Scam

Earn a Degree based on your Life Experience? Get a Genuine College Degree in 2 weeks? Claims like these have been turning up in our inboxes for years. In fact, this sort of scam pre-dates the Internet. Just pick up the phone, pay the specified fee and your degree will be mailed to you within a few weeks. This might sound great, but any degree or diploma procured in such a manner is certain to be worthless. The dubious companies offering these "qualifications" are the only ones that will reap any benefit from these schemes.

If you pay the fee, you will most probably receive a seemingly official document that might look quite impressive on the lounge room wall. However, that will be the extent of the document's worth. It is highly unlikely that you will land a job based on the bogus qualifications outlined on these fake degree documents. Employers or academia will not accept such qualifications. Even if an employer was gullible enough to give you a job on the strength of one of these fake degrees, you could soon find that you did not have the necessary skills to perform the job.

The spam emails usually claim that the degrees are fully accredited, approved or verifiable in some way and this may actually be true at face value. Thomas Nixon explains that the accreditation body itself may be bogus. In other words, the degree you purchase may indeed be accredited. However academia or government may not recognize the organization that offers this "accreditation". Thus any such accreditation or approval is likely to be meaningless.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to tertiary education. The only way to earn a university degree is through a lot of hard work.

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Write-up by Brett M. Christensen