Diploma mills and fake degrees are a global problem, that blockchain tech is tackling

Lifelong College was founded by Alex Lee Ye-lick, a member of the Lingnan University council, and is being investigated by the Hong Kong’s Education Bureau (EDB), in response to allegations that the college is operating as a diploma mill.

The college has been asked by the EDB to provide its student register, record of transfers and exemptions of credits, as well as student attendance data. Under Hong Kong law anyone who knowingly uses false documents with the intention of inducing somebody to accept them as genuine is liable to 14 years’ imprisonment. The same penalty is assigned for anyone who makes or possesses machines that create false documents.

In the UK, a new programme was launched by advisory firm Prospects, and its Higher Education Degree Datacheck (HEDD) service. The collaboration will target “bogus universities and perpetrators found to be masquerading online as genuine institutions with degree-awarding powers.”

Since 2011, HEDD has uncovered 190 fake institutions, through verifying academic credentials on behalf of employers. “Degree fraud is a serious problem,” says Prospects’ Business Service Director Jayne Rowley.

“In the first quarter of this year alone we added 42 bogus institutions to the database and there are thousands of fake degree certificates in circulation.”
— – Jayne Rowley, Director of HE Services at Graduate Prospects

In Pakistan, investigators arrested the chief executive of Axact, a software company accused of running a global diploma mill, discovering a storage room filled with blank fake degrees. “Axact makes tens of millions of dollars annually by offering diplomas and degrees online through hundreds of fictitious schools,” said the New York Times.

In light of the global scale of these fraudulent activities, educational institutions are beginning to take matters into their own hands. The software engineering School Holberton, announced last month that they were partnering with BitProof, a startup specialized in documents certification, to become the first academic institution to authenticate certificates on the bitcoin blockchain.

According to Louison Dumont, Founder of Bitproof, blockchain technology is ideal for storing financial transactions as it is decentralized, authenticated and resistant to tampering. "Naturally, it also makes a perfect place to store academic certificates."

"The blockchain is the future of certification, and we believe that in the following years, more schools will use the public blockchain to secure their certificates and diplomas. It is much more efficient, secure, and simple than what you can find today in the industry. We think first about our students — we want to make sure that our certificates will always remain valid and verifiable by employers. It will also keep them safe and impossible to copy or hack."
— – Sylvain Kalache, Holberton School Co-Founder

In Argentina, a blockchain company which focuses on validating financial transactions, BitCourt, recently constructed a blockchain solution for CESYT, an Argentinian College. The college has been teaching a wide range of subjects for nearly 40 years. They also offer different kinds of evaluations, for example, SAP certifications.

“Our custom-made solution for CESYT was a great example of blockchain technology being used to bring transparency, authentication and counterfeit-proof certification.”
— – BitCourt

The academic institution contacted BitCourt through a Bitcoin forum, which is organised by the government of Ciudad de Buenos Aires, about the possibility of recording the proof of authenticity for their career diplomas and certifications on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Academic fraud is a serious concern in Argentina. The current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is thought to have forged her academic diploma, while a doctor who had been practicing medicine for 42 years was using someone else’s diploma.

Working with the college, BitCourt has been able to provide a use case for verification of academic certification. “We recommended them to record everything using their own digital signatures, and we did an analysis about the advantages of using both, traditional digital signatures and timestamps, and their blockchain alternative,” stated BitCourt.

The blockchain holds many advantages over traditional digital signature systems, according to BitCourt. Multisig digital signatures using Bitcoin addresses are able to demand certain signing requirements that were not possible before, “and using solutions such as Ethereum, Counterparty or RootStock we could require much more complex conditions.”

The Argentine Ministry of Education requires diplomas to be signed by the College’s Director and Academic Secretary. Using software developed by BitCourt, the college created their own public and private keys. A backup was also made to enable recreation of the keys for a future batch of graduates.

“A cryptographic hash function was used with all diplomas, and after being digitally signed by each authority, results were recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain. This constitutes a proof of authenticity of each diploma.”
— – BitCourt

CESYT latest graduates had proof of their diplomas recorded in the blockchain on October 27, 2015. The college will continue to use the software in the future and in time, and will be adding a place on their website where diploma authenticity can be checked.