British government successfully shuts down several fake degree awarding websites

Good news to all prospective students, especially those applying from outside the UK, as several bogus degree awarding websites were successfully shut down during a huge crackdown on false universities awarding students such bogus certificates.

This is coming as the head of an investigatory body warns of the danger of “degree selfies”.

Following the crackdown, Higher Education Degree Datacheck (Hedd) was able to identify 220 bogus higher education institutions universities which sell fake degree certificates and non-existent courses.

While delivering her speech, Jayne Rowley, deputy chief executive of Prospects, said they are particularly worried by what she termed the “Twitter selfie problem”.

“This plays into the hands of fraudsters,” Ms Rowley told The Telegraph. “If someone wants to copy the certificate, they will be able to tell what colour the certificate is, what it looks like, the Vice Chancellor’s signature and so on.”

“In the summer we spent a lot of time contacting universities to tell students not to pose with their certificates and then put the pictures of social media.”

Accordingly, Hedd, which has received funding from the Department for Education since June 2015 to screen and scrutinise possibly fraudulent operations, has so far been able to shut down 40 bogus websites being.

Any potentially illegal activity is referred on to Trading Standards or the police, if it is based in the UK. For overseas outfits, Hedd alerts the relevant authority in that particular country.

Ms Rowley further said: “Some are copycat websites, where they have a similar name to an existing universities, like Cambridgeshire University or Manchester Open University.

“Some advertise ‘distance learning’ courses and send fake coursework assignments by email. People are being conned out of thousands, thinking they are actually studying.”

While fake university sites in the UK tend to be individuals running them out of their homes, there are far more sophisticated operations overseas and in some cases are multi-million pound businesses.

Recall how a company based in Pakistan was shut down after allegedly making millions of pounds from selling fake university degrees.