More than 200 senior executives have lost millions of yuan in at least seven degree scams uncovered by a district prosecutors' office in the first five months of the year.
Rao Mingdang, an official from Beijing's Haidian district procuratorate, said 33 swindlers had deceived 339 students - 80 per cent of whom were senior executives - out of 7.97 million yuan (HK$9.59 million), the China Youth Daily reported yesterday.
One victim alerted police on January 27 after she discovered that a PhD certificate she received a week earlier had failed to pass Ministry of Education authenticity verification.
She said she paid 190,000 yuan, including 50,000 yuan in certificate verification fees to a Beijing-based partner, for a PhD in business administration from 'Abraham Lincoln University'. She attended a few classes in an office building near Tsinghua University, although students were not required to go to classes or sit exams.
The operators of degree mills often set up offices near prestigious universities like Tsinghua and Peking University and pass them off as the representative offices for non-existent American universities with names similar to well-known American colleges.
In order to deceive prospective clients, operators even invited professors from real universities to give classes and duped clients with fake verification websites, the report quoted the prosecutors as saying.