Fazal
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And the website had some kind of tracker on the user. I'm not sure how it worked. But if I were on the phone with them, I can see everything they are clicking and hovering over.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Because what we were doing was building a profile on every new student. The more information we knew about them, the easier it is to sell them on the degree. So once we learned a lot of details about them, we'd call them and say, I'm not sure if you're interested in a business degree, but we have a big sale on them right now. And we knew very well that's exactly what they wanted.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
We haven't even got to step one yet. We also had a lead generation team, or maybe marketing team it's called, who would find potential students. What they did was made it so that if anyone posted their resume on monster.com or indeed.com, the marketing team would pick that resume up and look at it to see if they would benefit from a degree from our university.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
I don't know how they were able to immediately see everyone's resumes, but we were sent a lot of resumes.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
We'd then research that person, look for their social media profiles, try to find out their goals and ambitions, get to know them, then email or call them and say something like, Hey, I know you're struggling to find work. I want to help you with that. And of course, I'd try to get them to enroll.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Yeah, yeah. Okay, step one. We want the student to enroll, yeah? So we offer them a cheap introductory rate. A few courses. Maybe a few hundred dollars. Where are these students typically in the world? Like, are they in Pakistan? No, no, no. I never saw any Pakistani students. We mostly targeted US, UK, some of Europe, and a lot in the Gulf states. Like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, you know, Dubai, UAE.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
It wasn't just degrees. There were certifications we were offering. And high school diplomas too. But yeah, I did feel like this wasn't right. But Agzak charmed me to get me to not care. It was really weird, let me tell you. You ever see how Google's offices are?
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Yeah, we had all that too. But like 100 times more than what Google gives their employees. It was nuts. To begin with, Exact Offices had a kitchen with chefs to make you anything you wanted. Free, of course. But they also partnered with the best restaurants in town. So you could go to an internal website, order food from any of these restaurants, and they'd bring you the food right to your desk.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And not just like in a paper sack. Whatever food they brought you, it was always done with a touch of class. Served by a butler on a nice metal tray. And they would come collect the dishes from you and bring you any drink you asked for. So our food was taken care of while we were at work, but our food was taken care of at home too.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
In fact, they didn't want you to fuss with anything outside the office. If you needed groceries, just tell them what you want and someone will deliver it to your home.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
if your wife needed to see the doctor someone would go to your house and pick her up and take her to the doctor wait there with her and drive her home in fact they gave us two company cars that we could use however we wanted and they would get you anything you asked for take it for a concert or a cricket match they'd get it for you and even drive you there
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Oh, they had a yacht you could use. And let me tell you, in a country like Pakistan, this was extremely rare to be able to have access to a yacht. They didn't seem to care at expenses when it came to taking care of their employees. Dang, man, this sounds like a great place to work. Now I want to go work at Exact. No, no, no. Because they have you work every day. 29 days a month.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
That's what they required you to do. You get one day off a month. And no matter what you think you need to do, like take your kid somewhere or give your mother a birthday gift, they do it all for you. So you could really focus only on work. And that's all they wanted you to do. Just work all the time. And with students all over the world, you would always be busy. So did they pay you well?
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
The pay wasn't really that good. The commission was 1%. So if you got someone to enroll and they paid $300, you'd get $3. But because everything in your life is taken care of, it felt like we were living very well. Alright, so you told me step 1. Are there more steps to this? Yes. Okay, step 2. So you know once you get them enrolled, they might be in a one or two year program to earn their degree.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And new courses are released every few months for them to finish. But now that they are enrolled, I can call them up and say, Hey, listen, I know you're really itching to get done with school. I think I can talk to the dean and get more classes opened up earlier. Is that something you're interested in? Okay, but listen, what I'm going to be doing isn't easy.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
The dean doesn't like me doing this and I'll need a good reason to do it. So, if I can expedite your classes so you can just take all the classes you need now instead of waiting two years, would you be willing to pay $3,000 for that? And yeah, a lot of them were happy to hear they could finish their degree in just a week.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Well, see, the school website looked real. Like, it had accreditations listed. The website was approved by Secretary of State John Kerry. You know, when the US State Department says this is an accredited school, you believe it. Even though his signature was fake and he didn't actually approve it. But yeah, I think some of them did know. And they didn't care.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
They'd already paid a little and were convinced it was a real school, at least at the beginning. So if they felt it was real, then maybe they thought they could get away with it. They liked it that it seemed so real. So they could believe it and feel good about it. So when we'd send them the certificate or degree, we made it all exciting and congratulatory for them.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Even sent them a gown and graduation hat and asked them to take a picture of them wearing it, holding up their certification so we can put it on our website. And they would.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
They had civil engineering degrees, aeronautical degrees, teaching degrees, you know, English language certificates, law degrees, and a lot of high school diplomas. But we never did fake medical degrees. That was always off limits. Because someone could get hurt.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Yeah, I saw that news story too. It's unrelated to what we were doing. We did not sell pilots' licenses. And that story was in Pakistan. And like I said, I never saw any Pakistanis enrolling in these universities. And by the way, once we had one university going good and rolling, they would stand up another new university a few months later.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Because after a while, these things would be discovered as fake and we'd have to start all over. So it was just good practice to always be building new universities. And they kept giving us new ones to control.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
We had this team of sales agents, but the other people on the team would pose as people who worked at the school. So if you wanted to speak to the dean or administration's department or professor or counselor, we had it all set up to be able to have these roles you can talk to anyone you like.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Right. Our team had a goal of $2.4 million a month. And there were 23 teams in the company. You could see the leaderboard and how well each team is doing.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
There are more steps, yes. But here's where it gets weird. And you lose track of your steps. So let's say I had someone pay extra to get their degree quickly and we send them the degree. Well, we could go in a lot of different directions from here. One might be to call them up and say there's been a mistake in the degree. You could just make up whatever you wanted at this point.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Like you might say, sorry to inform you, but there's been an error. You didn't take all the courses you needed to earn this degree. I'm sorry, but we have to revoke your degree. and then try to sell them on more courses. Or you might tell them that their certification has expired and they need a new one.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Once we told someone their degree wasn't valid until you get an authentication certificate which is signed by a senator. And it costs an extra $7,500 to get that. People were taking this to extreme levels. The company just didn't care how you got money from these people. Just get money from them. Any way you can.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
So, some of us would call the person and pose as the local government and say something like, Sir, I'm calling from the government about your degree. Congratulations on your degree but unfortunately it's not valid in this country until you pay an importation fee of $10,000. And we'd get people to pay us all these extra fees. Dang, that's cold, dude. Yeah.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Or another was that we'd call them posing as a recruiter for a big company. We'd interview them for a job, hire them, but then say, Oh no, you're missing this one qualification. You need to get an English speaking endorsement, which I know where you can get one for $5,000.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Oh, and remember when we got them to take a picture of themselves in the graduation gown holding the degree? We'd sometimes use that photo against them. And just try to scam them by acting like someone else and saying, you don't know who I am, but I know you bought a fake degree from this school. Pay me $8,000 or I'll show this photo to your boss.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And dude, you guys are straight up extorting people. Yep, it was bad. It was really bad. But it felt so weird because Exact claimed to be the largest IT provider and had these big buildings and a whole fleet of company vehicles. So everywhere you looked, it felt normal and okay. My parents were proud of me for working in the big office building, you know.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And having a butler come bring us dinner at home from a five-star restaurant, it was very strange.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
There was one other thing that we might do with the person we are scamming. Sometimes we'd call them up to try to scam them, but they were just like, no way. I know I've been scammed. I paid all this money for a fake degree. You can't scam me for anymore. I'm on to you. Right? Well, in those cases, we would sometimes say, yeah, you know what? You're right. We are scammers.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
But hey, do you want in on it too? And what we do is set up a deal with that person to funnel the money through them, where payments would go through them and they could keep some of it.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
The money would get funneled through different accounts and would often end up in the account of a company in Cyprus or Latvia, you know, places that are a little more protected for this type of thing.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Yes, I met him. He would come to the office and meet with the top sales agents. And I'll tell you, he did not seem like, you know, shady or scammy. He appeared genuine and was influential at getting you to do great work. He never talked about all the phony things going on. He only said positive things like how much of an impact we are making giving people an education and it's changing lives.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And he encouraged us to achieve excellence in our work. So I don't know if he was the main scammer here.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
One thing about Pakistan is if you have money, you have power. you can get away with doing things that others would be arrested for. Oh, and he was always saying about how he was donating to charities and setting up different things to help the people of Pakistan. So a lot of people liked him.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Are you still working there? No, no, no. My wife was not happy with me being part of this and wanted me to quit. So I did. Yeah, I don't work there anymore. I've gone to work for a different tech company. So yeah, that's where we stand today.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Hello, hello, Jack. It's nice meeting you. Yeah, I'm excited to hear the story, but it sounds made up. I know. It's crazy, isn't it? Listen, I don't want my voice to be used if it's okay.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Meet Fazal. Okay, some background about me. I'm from Pakistan, actually. I worked in a call center for eight years.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
There was a group of us. We were all friends working there. But we saw this other company had a whole bunch of openings for call center employees. Exact.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
They had tall buildings all over. Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore. And you know, they had one of the biggest transport fleets as well. So they were big and we were excited. They were like good money and opportunity. We were tired of our call centre anyway. So, you know, it was time.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
We started working in their main hub in Karachi. Now, the way this call center would work is we would do customer support for whatever client we'd have. My first client was University in Manchester, England. And this was a little different than what I was used to.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
But the commission was very small. And not many people would even call that were interested. So the pay for this university was not very good. But inside this call center was a leaderboard. In fact, it would show you this leaderboard every time you logged into the computer. You could see how much money everyone in the call center was making.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And some people were making really great money, like insane amounts, hundreds of thousands. And you could see who their customers were, other universities. And they were very possessive of their clients. Like one day, another team was very busy and one of the calls rolled over to me. And that was for their university.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
I answered it and immediately someone came running over to me and said, no, no, no, no, transfer that call to me. We have this handled. So I never got a chance to get any good sales from other universities.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
They assigned this account to our whole group. It was strange. A few people on our team were webmasters, developers. A few were marketers. And then the rest of us were call center workers.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
They made this website in a couple of days. It looked really good. It looked just as good as any other fancy university out there. It had a list of courses you could take, a whole portal for students to log in and take classes remotely even. In fact, we had to do training so they could show us how to help students take their online courses.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
And they set up courses using Canvas, which a lot of schools use Canvas actually. But they showed us how to help students take their classes.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
He was realizing this school doesn't exist. This was something that Exact created from thin air. There was no real university. There was no learning, no classes, nothing. We were taking people's money and giving them fake degrees. Did they know it was fake? Maybe not at first, since we had only a few classes you could take a semester. So to them, it might have felt like they were cheating us.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Because here's the thing. When you go on Canvas to take the course, you can just hit next on every lesson to finish the whole course in minutes. So they'd get done with all their courses in like 20 minutes for the semester. and feel like we're the suckers for not making them go through the course properly.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
They even made us fake personas on LinkedIn, which looked like we worked at this university. And so if you looked up the university on LinkedIn, you'd see all these employees there and faculty.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
I don't think you understand. All of it was given to me. All their information. Yeah, okay, then explain. What do you mean? So, when they had to make an account on this fake school site, they had to enter in an email address for their username and make a password. Well, that password was stored in clear text and given to me.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Yeah, I thought the same. Kind of creepy. But it's far worse than that. I was talking with someone from another team. And they said, go to facebook.com and try to log in with this email and password. And we were able to log in to these people's Facebook accounts. Holy cow.