Why spend four years and thousands of dollars investing in an Ivy League degree when you can just pay for an inauthentic sheepskin that proclaims you a graduate? In 2009, law enforcement in Russia broke up a crime ring that reportedly sold fake Harvard diplomas for $40,000. Most diploma mills here in the U.S. are marginally less blatant; they adopt a name similar to a renowned school. Sounds like a simple trick, but sometimes it even fools the Feds. A 2004 study by the General Accounting Office found 463 federal employees held “degrees” from these pay-for-play institutions.
