Fake degrees, certificates, stamps found from Axact office

KARACHI: A number of degrees, bogus certificates, stamp boxes, monograms and other material suspected of being used for manufacturing fake degrees were on Thursday recovered from the Axact offices.
However, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials avoided giving any details in this regard. The FIA investigators also banned six officials of Axact from leaving the country till further orders.
As per the details, the FIA action on the Axact offices situated in Defence Phase VII was in progress after the FIA Corporate Crime Circle and Cyber Crime Circle had reached Axact’s office on Thursday morning. In this regard, the FIA Corporate Crime Circle had made some headway in its probe into the fake degree scam as the FIA officials recovered fake degrees, certificates and stamp-making machines from the sealed office of Axact. The degrees and certificates belonged to different international universities and higher education institutions and these degrees and certificates were to be issued to students belonging different countries of the world.
According to Axact officials, there were student consultancy call centres on the fourth andseventh floor of the Axact office, where callers from local numbers were not entertained while callers from international numbers were duly attended to and complete information was given to them about the fake degrees. As a sales pitch, Axact employees gave them a variety of choices about the fake degrees and callers were tempted to purchase their fake degrees.
According to FIA sources, the Axact officials who were barred from going abroad were Yasmeen Vuhra, Zeshan Anwar, Rahim Kashwani, Saleem Saeed and Ali Asghar.These Axact officials were barred from leaving the country while the probe was in progress and instructions were issued to all the exit points of the country in this regard. Moreover, the names of these Axact employees are being put on the Exit Control List (ECL).
The FIA officials also accessed the server of the Axact Dubai office to get a complete picture of the scam while decoding of the seized computers is underway. The FIA has also established a sub-office in the Axact building where the fake degree issue is being probed.