For the last number of years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in its annual study of education within its 35 member countries has found that Canada has had the largest percentage of college-educated adults in its population. Yay, Canucks!
While this year Canada, unfortunately, slipped behind South Korea into second place, this is a profound achievement and reflects Canada’s proud heritage of spending more public funds than any other OECD country on college education for its population.
So it is bitterly ironic that a scandal regarding phony degrees held by Canadians has recently erupted.
800 Canadians have phony degrees
Apparently, as many as 800 Canadians have been duping their fellow countrymen by having purchased fake degrees from overseas diploma mills.
According to CBC Marketplace which broke the story a few weeks ago:
“Fake diplomas are a billion-dollar industry, according to experts, and Marketplace obtained business records of its biggest player, a Pakistan-based IT firm called Axact. The [Marketplace] team spent months combing through thousands of degree transactions, cross-referencing personal information with customers’ social media profiles.
“The investigation revealed more than 800 Canadians could have purchased a fake degree.”
Worse for people who interact with these fraudsters, many of the degrees appear to be for professionals “like engineers and health care workers who lack the proper skills and expertise [and] can put the public at risk.”
Phony lawyer victimized clients
One victim was a Toronto lawyer who hired someone with a phony law degree to manage new business for him. The fraudster had presented impressive college documentation to get the job. But once at work took advantage of new clients, trying to squeeze as much money out of them as he possibly could. The experience ended up costing the real lawyer some $100,000 although the fraudster was only employed for a month.
It just shows that Canada is not immune to crime and fraud. Polite Canadians can be taken advantage of by those without scruples even though we appear to live in a cultural paradise of tolerance and love.
This is why we published our white paper on fraud in healthcare. We can get burned!
John Lyons says
In just over a century we have gone from 83% of people living in rural areas where people did business with people they know, worship alongside and whose kids go to the same schools. Most people did not venture more that 10 miles from their home in a lifetime. Now over 80% of people live in large urban areas, combined with transnational, inter and intra-provincial travel. Combine this with the Internet to do research and affordable technology producing high end counterfeit documents…ought we be surprised? Everyone relying and documents and identification to do business with people they don’t personally must learn to shift their focus from the documents to the nonverbal and verbal behavior of the applicant to get much better at assessing the reliability of declarations and statements people make to them. There is a way to do this, once interviewers learn how to gather information in the words of the applicant without contaminating the applicant’s own language, and then using a few tried and true techniques for identifying contextual red flag indicators [equivocations, missing information and deflections] of reliability issues.
Robert D. Smith says
Thanks for your comments.