Games of fraud

The story on the Axact company’s educational fraud, broken by the New York Times has created waves, big waves, that have stirred up an immediate storm. This then is the power of the media, and of course it is for purposes like this that the capacity to inform and spotlight the truth should really be used for.
Yes, the Axact scandal has brought in media attention also because of the company’s backing for the ‘Bol’ television channel. This is an inevitable side-effect. But the real lesson lies in the potential for investigative journalism that exists in a country where there are few regulations to crack down on fraudulent practices or protect people trapped by them, on the basis of both their gullibility and their desperation.
Desperation of course makes people more willing to believe, to cling onto straws and hope these straws will somehow be spun into gold. The conmen running such scams are experts at persuading them, and, as we saw with Axact, the secret world of cyberspace and a time when genuine human contact is no longer expected has made their task easier. It has also enabled them to spread it globally, expanding the market available.
Other, smaller scale operations such as the one perfected to a fine art by Axact, continue giving out educational qualifications to those seeking them at various prices. Even seminaries run such businesses in exchange for money. Possibly still more damaging is the increasing number of medical based scams that seem to have taken root in the country.
There is simply not enough commitment to stop them, and in many cases the authorities are either unbothered or unwilling to touch the powerful persons behind these operations.
In the early 2000s, a stem-cell company based in the US earned million by selling an entirely fraudulent technology in Pakistan. Astonishingly, its operations had initially been inaugurated by then president Pervez Musharraf, with official bodies giving it the green light to move ahead. While this operation now seems to have more or less vanished from the country, others continue. They offer the sale of e-books containing information that will cure virtually any illness – ranging from diabetes to neurological disorders.
Some say they are based in the US – although even the most perfunctory survey indicates their offices are really located in towns within the country. Others claim to offer far more sophisticated technologies intended to cure illness or treat medical conditions without the surgery conventional medicine recommends – and charge literally tens of thousands of rupees, even millions, for their ‘treatments’.
The scams target people at all kinds of levels. There are smaller ones aimed at those with less money with giant ‘body-scanning’ machines placed in low income areas and patients told these machines will detect precisely what illness they suffer and what the dietary or other cure for this will be. The size of these machines seems to impress often illiterate people who at any rate have little access to qualified medical practitioners in a nation that spends less than one percent of its GDP on healthcare for its people. These people are then left in the hands of quacks.
Infertility and the choice of the gender, or possibly even the appearance, of a baby seem to be the latest trend. And of course everyone wants a boy who is tall, not very dark and handsome. Couples without children or those who seek sons will continue for years to visit such clinics in the hope that their wishes will be fulfilled. Whereas the law that prevents parents knowing the gender of their unborn child is perhaps adhered to by offering a choice of giving birth to a boy or a girl, the very limited surveys carried out suggest 90 percent opt for a boy. This is also no surprise. Methods offered to achieve this vary from the genuinely scientific, available at extraordinarily high costs to the completely unrealistic which bank on superstition and often family and societal pressures placed on couples regarding the birth of children. There are many other areas of fraud. Loan schemes are one of them.
But the real question we need to ask is why our expanding media is not exposing these; not finding the will to bring stories to light. To some degree, any element of investigative journalism that existed into the 1980s and 90s has collapsed even further with the tabloidisation brought in by the advent of the scores of television channels which operate and seek to put out low quality, cheap programmes to which audiences seem to have become addicted.
This is why talk shows that bank on pitching political or ideological opponents against each other work so well. They cost very little to produce and seem to be viewed in the same manner as soap operas in other nations – a kind of concocted drama intended to entertain but not inform. They bring forward nothing that is new and since this is true of much of the television industry, despite its penchant for ‘breaking’ news, newspapers appear to have simply followed rather than realising their own future may lie in rediscovering the lost art of investigation and in depth reporting.
The ‘investigative’ stories that are put out, sometimes indentified by a flashy logo in case we are left confused as to what they intend to say, are more often than not based on information leaked by individuals for personal reasons and picked up by reporters for reasons of their own.
The scope for looking at so many aspects of our country is immense. Beyond fraud, we have issues such as human trafficking, the child sex industry, the booming porn industry available over social media and much else to look into. But nobody appears willing to do this. Somewhere, things have gone very wrong and even as the media has expanded, our body of information has shrunk dramatically. We really know less and less about what is happening within our country.
The lack of ethics does not help either and neither does the desperate need for jobs with many of those employed at Axact opting to continue because the choice was to end up without any pay package to bring home at the end of the month. Of course, it is easier to speak out against a powerful employer when others have already done so and it is interesting to see how those who have left ‘Bol’ seem to have tweeted their decisions literally within minutes of each other.
Perhaps the NYT story can inspire others within the country to follow suit. Of course in many cases, even while there is a lot of information around, reporters are simply too scared to put it in print. Or else they are muffled by owners and editors who do not wish to rock the boat.
But all the factors involved lead to create a situation where we really know very little about what is happening all around us. This perhaps is the reason why we are taken by surprise when major stories concerning our country break internationally and are backed by strong evidence which is impossible to deny. There is much to think about for the media and all those involved in it. Will they do this thinking? It is hard to say, but a change does not seem very likely.
The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.
Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com