Professor George Gollin of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign stumbled upon this scheme when he got annoyed by the regular junk mails he received from this university, and decided to probe and write about their activities on the web. It is after four years since he started writing that law-enforcement officials sought his help and he provided them with his stored knowledge of four years to “connect the dots” from a heap of intelligence.

It is noted that some of the degrees issued by this university were on highly specialized subjects like Dentistry, Engineering and even Oncology. But what shocked the federal authorities most was the potential lending hand such diploma mills could offer to terrorists who are eager to enter the US, since people applying for student visa, with a US recognized degree are hardly turned down. Out of the list of 10,000 degrees “conferred” by St.Regis University, many government officials, including a deputy United States marshal bought a fake online degree. There are also officials from the CIA and even the White House who bought degrees to be eligible for promotion or to jack up their salaries

The universities claimed to be accredited by the government of Liberia, and a number of bogus accrediting agencies. It is also reported that officials from the Liberian embassy in Washington were in cohorts with the runners of the diploma mill. The authorities at the federal capital will soon announce the names of the junk degree holders who belong to 130 different countries, a sizable number of them from the Middle East.

The investigation team trapped the criminals as James Bond does in his movies- posing an investigating official as a shadowy ex-Syrian army official seeking a degree in chemical engineering. After a week the degree was handed over to him with distinction. The authorities arrested a couple and charged them along with their daughter and a webmaster on crimes of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud.