“Today it is very important to have a title and it is worth the effort to achieve it because it can open many doors for you that would otherwise remain closed to you.” That is the claim that still stands on one website that promises university degrees “at crisis prices”. The effort in this case is not four years of study, classes, work, tutorials and exercises, but a simple payment that in just a few days will give you a diploma identical to the original to present in a job or to present hang it in a query. After a year of investigations, police in Spain have just arrested around twenty people accused of using these forged documents to practice skilled professions, some of them in the healthcare sector. The agents confiscated qualifications from thirty Spanish universities.
The investigation began when one of the university centers informed police investigators that it had found a false document. The agents then plunged into a world of websites promising diplomas “indistinguishable from the original” and “100% legal” from professionals promising “seriousness and confidentiality”. The truth is that most of these sites were pure scams charging users who never received any documents. “But we found one that issued documents that could be sent by email or physically by courier,” explains one of the inspectors who investigated the issue. It was through one of the parcel delivery companies used by the counterfeiters that the police began accessing the network’s customer list. The makers of forged documents are in the Dominican Republic and have not yet been arrested. The police suspect that they not only had Spanish customers, but also from other countries.
Some of the university degrees were confiscated by the police during the burglary.
The titles can be purchased in more or less expensive packages, depending on the customer’s needs. “The simplest cost 300 euros and the most comprehensive around a thousand. It depended on whether you wanted the degree only in digital form, whether you needed a certificate, different diploma formats…”, specifies the other inspector of the Information Brigade of the Province of Madrid who led the investigation. The payments were made through remittances, which the Dominican organization said were intended for medicines for loved ones.
The diploma that surprised the agents the most was a certified title. So much so that they suspected the customer “had the audacity” to ask the university for the seal. But the truth is that the counterfeiting network made it too. That was his perfectionism. “It was impossible to tell they were copies,” says one researcher. There were not only university degrees, you could also acquire language, master’s or vocational training degrees. The network had also investigated who the rectors were at the time the titles were awarded and what real signatures they had. “In the inquiries, the clients had to specify the year of the exhibition, the degree and the university,” the researchers explain. The sophistication used in the docs is striking in that it is absent from the sites where they advertise their services and has a more than questionable aesthetic. The page featured a customer satisfaction section that displayed WhatsApp messages from satisfied users, which read, “I’ve already received the title.” It’s perfect”.
Another website promoting bogus titles.
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Possessing such a title is not a crime in itself, but using it to get a job or display it in a clinic is. The agents had to track down all of this network’s customers and track and interview their surroundings to ensure that they had used these diplomas to obtain their employment. They also went to the Department of Universities to check if there were any titles that matched the titles they were examining. The police officers investigated more than a hundred suspected buyers and were finally able to prove the crime of usurpation in about twenty of them spread across Spain.
The list of professions is extensive. There were teachers, occupational therapists, chemical engineers, supposed law graduates, economists, psychologists… “Many of them came to start their studies but never finished them. Others were scared because they suspected they could always ask for the papers…” The oldest diploma they discovered was that of an inmate, who earned it in 2013 and has been practicing since, although the researchers preferred not to reveal what profession they earned practiced “Managers were also there,” emphasizes one of the inspectors.
This is one of the first operations against the clients of a network of false titles of this type developed in Spain. Professional associations are the ones who usually take cases of intrusiveness to court, but they are unable to uncover such an overall framework. There was now a hole in the walls of some of these inmates where a false title used to be affixed.
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