The Beijing Justice Bureau began cooperating with the municipal public security bureau last week to severely punish those who interfere with notarization orders and provide fake certificates.
Cooperation between the two departments, which aims to more effectively solve cases involving disturbances and fraud in the notarization field, was planned at the end of last year.
With the rapid development of the country's economy and increasing demand for notarization, the justice bureau sees an increasing importance in these cases and has joined with the municipal public security bureau to investigate them.
Most of the victims of fake certificate fraud are white-collar office workers, and some are even company executives, a bureau official said.
Bogus PhDs require little effort to earn
Liu Tongyan (pseudonym) received a text message in October 2010 from a company claiming it would issue a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) conferred by US-based Lincoln University at a price of 190,000 yuan (US$29,370).
Liu called the number. A man surnamed Deng told her she only needed to take several training sessions – without attending any lectures or taking any exams – in order to get the degree. Liu wired the money and signed an agreement with Deng’s company.
After the training sessions, Liu "graduated" in January 2011, merely three months after receiving the text message. Deng handed her a DBA supposedly issued by Lincoln University.
Liu called the police after she found that the certificate, which bore the seal of the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange (CSCSE), was a fake.
Counterfeiters hold the real thing
It turned out that Liu was not the only victim of a fake certificate. The People's Procuratorate of Haidian District in Beijing Municipality said it had handled seven cases relating to notarization fraud from January to May this year, involving about 7.97 million yuan ($1.23 million).
Most of the 339 victims, who came from various provinces all over the country, received the text message and called back for consultation, an official at the procuratorate said. 80 percent of them were in senior management positions, in which degrees in administration would be helpful to their CVs.
Ironically, the suspects involved in offering the fraudulent degrees were educated and holders of legitimate certificates.
"You have to be informed before you can cheat someone with a fake certificate," Rao Dangming, the officer responsible for the cases, said. "We have one suspect with a real PhD, three with master’s degrees and the rest of them completed college-level studies."
The suspect enterprises registered for business licenses with capital less than 500,000 yuan (US$77,000). Despite their size, the companies created an assembly line for certificate fraud which involved recruiting staff, hiring teachers for the so-called "training sessions" and providing fake notarization, Rao said.
"Some of the training sessions even had a thesis defense like a real university," he said.
Many of them were located close to famous universities in order to increase authenticity.
"Some even rented classrooms at universities and hired real professors to teach the training sessions," Rao said.
A retired college teacher reported to the police in March, saying that someone had hired him to teach a seminar for company executives at Tsinghua University. He later found out it was a training session for students of Lincoln University.
"The paid me 10,000 yuan (US$1550) for each day I taught," he told the police.
