During the trial of a fraudster in Annapolis:

In court, [US Attorney P. Michael] Cunningham argued that Barefoot was a “serious” flight risk, noting an “overarching assessment” of her conduct and character. He said that while Barefoot has repeatedly claimed to have a doctorate in childhood trauma from Lexington University, he doesn’t believe she ever attended college.

[Her attorney] countered that Lexington University was an online college. But a 2002 report on “diploma mills” by the U.S. General Accounting Office described it as a “nonexistent institution.”

… and found this illustrated account of for-profit colleges in my email. Thank you, Dave.

Zardari (with whom UD spent an afternoon at Blair House many years ago when his wife Benazir Bhutto was visiting the United States), himself has a fake degree, like much of the Pakistani political elite.

I guess it’s always been a kind of tradition there, pretend credentials.

The Pakistani press has lately decided to make a story of it. You can see that Raisani up there is pissed.

… of a new school.

… In Italy, everyone over the age of eighteen is Dottore. Or Professore.

Even their sports journalists insist on it. A Canadian writer talks about European sports reporters:

The Italian press corps is … the most cliquish. The rest of the press is simply ignored. Like the German press gang, the media passes worn by the Italians often make for interesting reading. About half of them appear to be called “Professor” while the Germans are big on being “Doctor.” I’ve always assumed this has to do with the official title a person with a BA or MA is entitled to receive in Italy or Germany. Me, I’ve got some university education, but I wouldn’t even mention that unless there was a point, and I’d be mortified if anybody called me “Professor.” I just writes for the paper.

Professor, Doctor… They love their titles over there, earned and unearned. And they bring this ethos with them wherever they go, as Australia has discovered:

Controversial builder Luigi Casagrande has resigned as director of the Government-owned Queensland Motorways board amid allegations he faked his credentials.

Mr Casagrande, a 2009 Order of Australia recipient, had repeatedly claimed in company annual reports he had a Dott Ing, an advanced engineering degree, from the University of Padua.

The Courier-Mail reported on Monday that the university had no record of the degree and Mr Casagrande declined to clarify the issue.

Despite being on its board since 1995, Mr Casagrande’s credentials were never checked by Queensland Motorways bosses.

… The action also puts Mr Casagrande’s Order of Australia at risk if the honours panel considers his actions dishonest and disreputable.

Almost 20 recipients have lost their awards since 1975. [Twenty? Isn’t that rather a high number? What did they do?]

The Queensland Government entrusted Mr Casagrande with its most important roads projects, including the Gateway Bridge Upgrade. He chaired the committee that oversaw the $2.1 billion project.

… Mr Casagrande’s other credentials as president of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Brisbane also are being amended…

———- The Courier-Mail broke the story. ———-

Really, even if there’s no legal requirement that you do a couple of Google clicks on a person’s education, don’t you think you should do it anyway? When autistic children are involved?

Steven Feldman, the pretend psychologist hired — because he was the cheapest person available –by the family courts of Saratoga New York, hurt a lot of people. A diploma mill bullshitter, he determined the fate of many children and parents in that community in his capacity as expert advisor to judges.

At this point it is uncertain what effect it could have on Posporelis v. Posporelis [On Feldman’s recommendation, the court took shared custody away from the father in this case. Feldman wrote that the father had a personality disorder.] should Steven Feldman be found guilty of the charges against him. However, my sources tell me that there are numerous divorce, custody and other cases in Saratoga County in which Dr. Steven Feldman was involved and the potential fallout, should he be found guilty, is significant.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish, eh? Didn’t check his credentials, only went for him because he was cheap… And now look.

Background here.

******************************

Oh. Here’s another one.

A Houston man who falsely claimed a doctorate in psychology but who’d purchased a degree online pleaded guilty today to receiving nearly $1 million from Medicare and Medicaid for phony behavioral counseling.

Edward Birts, 51, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud, health care fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to a written statement from U.S. Attorney José Angel Moreno.

Birts operated a behavioral counseling company called Courage to Change. He’d awarded himself bogus professional certifications in counseling, according to prosecutors. His plea agreement with the government said he billed the two government programs for $1.2 million for nonexistent psychological treatments and received more than $968,500 in payments.

Birts acquired beneficiaries’ names, addresses and account numbers which he would use to file false claims. Prosecutors said he claimed he employed a nonexistent doctor who ran nonexistent group therapy sessions…

A commenter on an article about the latest diploma mill travesty gets it right. It’s easy to find out if someone’s educational claims are fraudulent. In this case, involving a Saratoga New York pretend psychologist who’s been running around ruining people’s lives, “State Police were notified about [Steven] Feldman’s suspicious credentials by a person referred to Feldman for evaluation by a Family Court judge. That man researched Feldman’s credentials and came across evidence that one of the schools, Hamilton University, is not an accredited institution.”

Right. See, if you’re a divorced man desperate, let’s say, to retain custody of your kids, you’re very motivated to find out whether the person who gets to decide – or at least powerfully advise – on that question is qualified to do so. You do the research — which involves a couple of Google clicks — and you find out the guy’s a fraud. “Feldman allegedly claims to have college degrees from Richardson University and Hamilton University, diploma mills once located in a former Motel 6 in Evanston Wyoming.”

Hamilton’s fakery is especially easy to discover — it was the featured diploma mill in congressional testimony and in a 60 Minutes special a few years ago.

But the Public Defender’s Office and the County Family Court (both of which chose to employ Feldman) don’t care. When it comes to the welfare of Saratoga’s children, any lying piece of shit will do.

**********************************

Steven Feldman faces four felony charges: grand larceny, scheme to defraud, falsifying business records and offering a false statement.

… on you.

All our magical doctors put a spell on us. They toss their mystic parchments into a brew and sing

Doctors, Doctors, PhDs,
Honor’ble those, Honor’ble these,
‘Plomas of birth-strangl’d thought
Express-deliver’d, sold and bought…

The magical doctors teach at universities and run legal systems and lead political parties and keep us on the true path at church.

The charm is firm and good.

… later this summer. She’ll meet up with Mr UD after he gives a paper there, and they’ll stay in the mountains for awhile.

UD will also make a little pilgrimage to American Fork, where her graduate school mentor, Wayne Booth, was born.

She’s reminded to mention this because Utah’s in the news this morning. The NCAA has finally decided that two semi diploma mills that give diplomas to high school flunkies recruited by Division I universities don’t any longer make the cut.

That leaves about twenty other semi diploma mills catering to recruits.

Or rather twenty-two. The NCAA’s decision represents a business opportunity.

The NCAA said Tuesday it no longer will allow teenagers to use online high school course credit from BYU to beef up their grades in key classes. The NCAA also announced it won’t recognize transcripts from the American School correspondence program in Illinois.

The move is part of new NCAA rules that require “regular access and interaction” between teachers and students in the 16 core courses required to establish initial eligibility for new college athletes.

The changes don’t affect NCAA Division II schools, but a panel representing them will reconsider the measure in June.

I’m sure those Division II schools will be along any moment now.

The NCAA in its announcement framed the prohibition as part of a larger effort to clamp down on online or mailed-correspondence courses taken by athletes. But for the moment, the NCAA is only banning online courses from BYU and one other institution, the Illinois-based American School.

The NCAA, in the press release on its website, said BYU and American School were “two of the programs most frequently submitted to the NCAA Eligibility Center.”

… Students trying to get or stay eligible to play sports at the University of Kansas, University of Mississippi and Nicholls State University …have been found to have improperly taken BYU correspondence courses. In the case of Nicholls State, some athletes didn’t know coaches enrolled them in the BYU courses.

Can there by any more pitiful sports program than Nicholls State? It cheats to get its guys on campus, and then no one comes to its games…

She’s going to blame the fools on his church’s hiring committee.

Monseigneur Pastor His Holiness Rafer Byrdsong did everything humanly possible to reveal his comprehensive fraudulence to the Third Baptist Church of Suffield, Connecticut. He provided reams of obviously bogus educational and other background documentation. A local news channel reports:

… He claimed he was a Navy chaplain. When the I-Team received his service records, it was discovered he was in the Navy, but as a cook.

The Chaplain Corps said they never heard of him.

No records exist for many of Byrdsong’s former parishes, and officials in Florida and California said there were no records that the colleges and universities he claimed to attend ever existed either.

When the I-Team looked in to the school that supposedly gave Byrdsong a doctorate, it was discovered there was a school with a similar name that would give anyone a PH.D. to anyone who pays for it, with no classes required.

Upon closer inspections, all of the documents given by Byrdsong to the church when he applied to be pastor were full of misspellings.

The certificate for the doctorate even had the word diploma misspelled.

… While digging into Byrdsong’s past, his ex-wife was found. She said she divorced him and brought bigamy charges against him when she found out he was married to five other women. She said hearing what Channel 3 found made her sad, but it wasn’t a surprise.

Pamela Mann said, “Can he preach? Yes. Can he teach? Yes. Does he have the persona that would bring people to him, yes, as any good con artist would.”…

I don’t care how small your church is. If you can’t even be bothered to check one of the claims a candidate for pastor makes, it’s your fault when you end up with Elmer Gantry.

“I hold degrees in Accounting and Law,” says candidate Ron Holly on his website. He’s running for Treasurer of Monterey County, California. Yet his law degree, writes the Monterey County Herald, “comes from a non-accredited diploma mill of a law school.”

Ron Holly is not a lawyer…

I’ve watched politicians and bureaucrats in Monterey County for almost 30 years now. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been more insulted than when I heard the evasions and excuses emanating from Ron Holly when he and two other candidates for Monterey County treasurer-tax collector showed up at The Herald on Thursday to seek our editorial board’s endorsement for his candidacy.

The Board of Supervisors doesn’t care. He’s got their endorsement.

For those who need reminding, this is how it typically goes.

The city’s top policeman [Diploma mill stories are almost always about police forces, fire departments, and the armed services. More often than you’d think, they’re also about schools – public schools. Any organization that forks over cash to people who show it a piece of paper that looks more or less like a college degree is asking for diploma milling. Unless these organizations learn how to screen bogus degrees, they should stop with the whole college degree incentive pay deal.] will face a Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission panel next month, stemming from a bogus college-degree scandal.

Fruitland Park [Florida] Police Chief Mark Isom had received about $775 in incentive pay for what was supposed to be his attendance at an accredited college, which turned out to be a degree mill.

… A criminal investigation dove into the college education of Isom earlier this year after the city of Fruitland Park learned [that the school listed was] a non-accredited and bogus institution, Youngsfield University, which is registered as a corporation in Delaware.

Isom had contended he took the courses from 2003 to 2009. A state statue allowed the city to pay Isom an extra $36 each pay period as an incentive for his having accredited college degrees.

But Isom reportedly paid a one-time electronic payment of $1,110 to the school on March 17, 2009 for online bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminology, diplomas that were then mailed to him, according to the FDLE. [People often ask UD — well, Mr UD once asked UD — why people continue to pay so much money to these places when they could probably, with sufficient technological skill, produce these pieces of paper for themselves, for free. It’s a good question. The idiots on the other end of this, after all, never notice the thing is bogus; or they do notice, but they don’t care. It almost always takes outsiders to blow the whistle in these cases, as in Isom’s bitter complaint that some “disgruntled citizen” fingered him… So why buy the thing? Why part with a thousand bucks? Because most of the diploma mills, for that money, hire some person to sit at a phone and answer it in the unlikely event anyone actually calls to verify credentials. “Good afternoon, Youngsfield University, registrar’s office!… Hm, just a moment… Yes, Mr. Isom was a student here… Would you like me to mail you his transcripts?”]

An FDLE investigation report that was turned over to the State Attorney Office for review stated the college was as a bogus institution and degree mill. And investigators said Isom couldn’t provide the name of a “single” textbook, reference book, instructor or course after allegedly completing 63 separate and distinct bachelors and masters level courses from the school in the six years. [As with the just-tenured professor of justice studies at Northeastern Illinois University who one-clicked his PhD, diploma mill grads won’t show you their thesis or their transcripts, and they can’t remember what they read or who they worked with.]

The report added that Isom had refused to meet with investigators…

The real question is: Given how similar all diploma mill stories are, and how obvious the institutional structure sustaining the mills, why are diploma mills still a billion dollar or so industry?

And the answer is: No one gives a shit.

… the way you know, if you’re a student paying to go there, that you’ve really chosen the bottom of the barrel, is the presence of known diploma mill graduates among the faculty.

Ramapo College, for instance, knows that Frank Tanzini bought his degree at Breyer State, one of the most notorious diploma mills, but it doesn’t care. They have him teaching (wait for it) Educational Leadership.

It’s just as funny to have the sort of person who goes to diploma mills teaching justice:

The granting of tenure last year for Theophilus “T.Y.” Okosun, a professor of justice studies, has caused rumbles among faculty members at [Northeastern Illinois University, a] 12,000-student public university on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Okosun got his doctorate from the now-shuttered Pacific Western University in Los Angeles.

Rumbles? Rumbles? It bothers people who earned higher degrees over many years that one of their tenured colleagues got his degree in two seconds after pressing PRESS HERE FOR YOUR PHD TODAY! on his laptop?  And… what?  What was that?  They’re worried that he’s teaching students and he doesn’t know shit?

Okosun declined to provide a copy of his transcript or of his thesis.

Such contempt. Such contempt for their students. For the taxpayers. For the university.

A local candidate for the Cape Coral city manager position has been ruled ineligible because the master’s degree he claims does not meet the requirements for the position.

… [Tom] Leipold listed a master’s degree from a college that was not accredited. That school was raided by the FBI for presenting fraudulent diplomas. A Florida statute prohibits anyone from claiming an academic degree from a school that is not properly accredited.

… The job requirements for the city manager post include a master’s degree in public administration, business administration, finance, economics or a related field. Leipold’s application lists a master’s degree in hypnotherapy, not considered a related field.