1 out of 20 Job Seekers in Malaysia have Fake Degrees

Finding a job is not easy these days, especially when you have to compete with others who possess better qualifications and more experience. However, that does not mean one should take a shortcut, such as getting a fake degree. This seems to be a growing trend in this country.

One out of 20 job seekers in Malaysia has fake qualifications, a corporate fraud investigation agency found. It also said that one in 10 job seekers has credentials from unaccredited institutions.

This comes as a foreign documentary highlights a list of possible over 80 Malaysians with local addresses having allegedly bought fake degrees via Axact, a Pakistani company known for degree mills.

Datuk Seri Akhbar Satar

Managing director of Akhbar & Associates, Datuk Seri Akhbar Satar said 5% to 7% of the people that they investigated had fake degrees while 10% to 15% had degrees from unaccredited universities. Akhbar & Associates is an agency that conducts background checks on job seekers for companies. 

“Many of these people with fake degrees are applying for senior management jobs and it happens in multiple industries, including banks, clinics and hospitals,” said Akhbar, who is also Certified Fraud Examiners Association (Malaysia Chapter) president and former president of Transparency International Malaysia.

According to him, the agency also found doctors who possess fake qualifications. Akhbar was responding to an Al-Jazeera documentary into fake degree mills in Pakistan that revealed a list of those who purportedly purchased fake qualifications, including PhDs and Masters, from Axact.

The documentary censored the names of the "students", but not the local addresses. Based on the local addresses, there were possibly over 80 Malaysians on the list. The list was seized by Pakistani authorities when they raided Axact's offices. Its founder, Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh was later arrested and charged with fraud.   

More about the documentary

According to the 101 East documentary, thousands of people with fake degrees were found to be working as doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers in South-East Asia, and that includes Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. “Thousands of people are employed in safety-critical jobs while holding bogus qualifications,” it reported.

Axact employees masqueraded as several fake online universities which promised thousands of paying 'students' a degree qualification without having to attend any class or take any examination. The 25-minute documentary exposes sales tactics used by the company.

The documentary found over 370 fake online universities such as Brooklyn Park University, Nixon University and Newford University. Many of these fake online universities claim to be based in the United States and all of them are linked to Axact.

One of those who bought a fake PhD was the former planning and finance minister of Myanmar. The minister admitted to purchasing his qualification from the bogus online university Brooklyn Park.

Malaysia was "one of the worst" 

According to Akhbar, Malaysia was "one of the worst" when it came to people purchasing fake degrees. The practice of background-checking in Malaysia was poor, and these people exploited this weakness. 

Akhbar said that many companies did not lodge a police report or take legal action against their employees with fake degrees. They prefer to take internal action instead.

“In the end, these fake degree holders have no record of their fraud and will get a job in another company. They will continue to work in the system,” said Akhbar, adding that companies had a responsibility to make a police report.

Checking qualifications

Datuk Dr Rahmah Mohamed, CEO of Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) said no company should condone the practice of fake qualifications. She said it was necessary for the public, especially employers, to make sure that the qualifications of their employees were accredited by the accreditation agencies.

Datuk Dr Rahmah Mohamed

“The Malaysian government has put the quality of higher education a priority as a key factor in producing competitive human resources and talent to support national advancement,” she said, adding that it had set up accreditation systems through MQA and other professional and regulatory organisations.

She added that employers could check online the lists of accredited programmes offered by Malaysian higher education institutions through the Malaysian Qualifications Register (MQR) and other professional and regulatory bodies.

Malaysia is not unfamiliar with the case of fake qualification. Back in February, several politicians including Deputy Foreign Minister Datuk Marzuki Yahya and former Johor Menteri Besar Osman Sapian were found to had misrepresented their qualifications.

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