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Posts tagged with: Axact

The Axact Controversy – Whodunnit?

Admittedly – for the past two days it seems I’ve been obsessed with the Axact story – I honestly have no personal vendetta, don’t even know any person there, but it pisses me off when someone bullies another into silence and Axact has been notorious for this game since too long to remember. Any attempt to criticize Axact has landed people in a shit hole of Cease and Desist notices and a few have escalated to legal lawsuits resulting in gag orders or content deletion

Over the two days, many critics been speculating as to what’s actually going on? is there a bigger game to this controversy, than what meets the eye – lets break down the case hoping to evaluate from all angles

Axact Degree Mill Scam

This in my opinion is clear open and shut case, they have been involved in this scam for many years, last night I even stumbled across a video of one of Axact’s sham university front Rochiville University awarding an MBA to a dog, but all the investigative click work from various listed universities lead towards Axact, granted more digital forensics may need to fully prove the connection but its almost there.  This is the entire reason why the company is in deep shit.  Had they run a clean white color business, nothing could have spoilt this multi million dollar company.

There should be no two opinions about it, if its proven to be a scam, this needs to be caught and dealt with immediately.  The government should open legal class action proceedings in various countries allowing affectees who’ve been scammed – to apply for settlements and reimburse them with damages all payable from Axact assets. Pakistan should instead be seen as proactively helping correct a crime to set an example at the very least

Anti-BOL Lobby

This is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary with players like Express and GEO, all stand to gain from damaging a media channel which has the potential to hijack their market share, but for the theory that they may have orchestrated this entire NYT story, I have my doubts.

The story was published in The New York Times, and not in Express Tribune, had it been a big developing story being planned by the Express group they would have broken hints of it previously on its own TV channel.  To hold onto a story this long, is not the hallmarks of Pakistani media, it requires the patience of a seasoned journalists who did all the investigative ground work, he may have been composing this story for many days and finally when all the things fell in place & his sources fully checked out & fully convinced  NYT editors he found the front page of NYT Monday morning, which coincidentally also gets published in Pakistan  – I genuinely think Declan Walsh did his own homework, though he may have been assisted locally from the Anti-BOL lobby to fill in the gaps for his investigation

 

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Axact Sells an MBA Degree to a Dog

As if the funny stories about Axact could possibly not get any funnier – we now have an authenticated investigative report of Axact’s sham university Rochwille University awarding College MBA degree to a dog in Vermont USA. Rochville Universoty also happens to be listed in New York Times list of Axact’s Sham university websites for $499

First please kindly watch this video below, uploaded in 2011, of a Vermont news reporter exposing how a dog named Chester Ludlow obtained an MBA degree from Rochville University in 2009 and was even supplied with proper detailed transprcipts and heck along with in the package came a car sticker as well, talk about alumni perks


Distance MBA Degree Earned by Dog

A closer look at Rochville University, a link which was also reported on Declan Walsh’s article in NYT, scrolling onto their website if you click LIVE CHAT, a window pops up, revelaing the source code you shall see that the encoding includes a special xchatlivepro code which is hosted on xchatlivepro.com webiste – in yesterday’s video we shared about these sham websites having the same chatting link, we showed how almost any randombly selected website lead to this Axact Chat server, which has been confirmed by my sources to be expliclity used by Axact employees while connecting with potential clients online. Its funny, that eversince our exposure the backend xchatlivepro links, has been taken offline, specifically the Axact employee login window which was previously accessible at http://xchatlivepro.org/Login.aspx.

To make things easier, and to also document it as evidence, a short video clearly shows the above steps pointing back to the same servers


Axact Sells an MBA Degree to a Dog


FIA Raids Axact Offices

So its all over the news, Minister of Interior Ch Nisar has constituted an FIA task team to investigate the NY Times report and the allegations on Axact, following which, Axact offices in Islamabad and Karachi have been raided.  Good for starters, but my hunch is – its a media defusing tactic

Media Coverup?

Had if Govt decided to wait another day or more to act upon this story – we in media/social media would have gotten an additional day to brow beat on Axact – clever media strategy is to quickly diffuse this case as it has already reached a tipping point – they may have chosen to go into immediate damage control, because now by tomorrow – statements like – “its being investigated” would have diverted all media attention to something else…. and the Pakistani nation moves on – and Axact again lives happily every after …. Nothing found since the entire issue was placed on sleep mode

On the issue, if FIA should have issued warrants and formal charge before raid:

This is a genuine concern, FIA for all intents and purposes should approach this case with care, but announcing a raid with legal warrants means a delay and any person empowered to do a “delete-all” on the servers could mean significant damage to any possible evidence – in the present digital era – immediate confiscation of equipment is more important, than paperwork (which needs to be carefully followed up)

What FIA needs to do (ideally) is raid & control of the entire facility, wait for the clients lawyers to come and then one by one confiscate any/all equipment under their explicit watch, sealing them as they go on – FIA should also come with an independent watch-dog who can give valuable advise on how to best preserve the data for both parties – but that said this is in the idea world —- in Pakistan – you would see all the CPU’s loaded a mile-high police van tied down by flimsy rope. God help the data.

What Next

Time will tell… it could be a Khanani & Kalia like prosecution they may end up being totally annhilated and disappear with whatever wealth they have stored abroad, as Axact has been used and abused and its now time to move on.  Or it could simply be asked to move forward launch BOL and continue building a dynasty it has quietly waited on the sidelines for – while the Axact Degree Mill could easily continue under a new umbrella, simply said – there shall be scammers if there are enough people ready to be scammed, business as usual


Axact Landing in Hot water over Degree Mill Scam

Today early morning New York Times Pakistan Desk editor Declan Walsh publishes an expose on Axact and its Degree Mill Scam that has been under the covers for many years.  Previously any attempt to expose this company usually ended up in a legal cease and desist letter issued to anyone whosoever published anything negative on Axact.

We, as independent bloggers suffered the same fate when in 2008 Unaiza Naseem published an simple inquisitive story Unveiling operations of a local software house

Now that this article was printed in a news paper, I have the urge to know if there’s any fact in the software house “AXACT” doing porn business. There are links in the article that show the name of the software house and the discussion forums from the employees

It landed her with a hefty lawsuit which the metroblogging team in LA fully resisted and refused to delete the link – but Unaiza was tormented locally in Karachi,

Axact ultimately petitioned Google to have it removed from its search results.  The chilling effects reproduction of the notice shows that the Sindh high court notice is against Ummat newspaper, they only included KMB links and got away with it from Google.  Similar incidents have happened to WCCF techie forum run by Saad Abdullah, who reportedly deleted the forum topic 20 days later to avoid unnecessary issues.

Declan Walsh it seems finally reported this news story with support from an ex-employee who has provided him with some concrete evidence of the scam happening in the name of online degree mills.  $600,000 from only 22 customers, is a goldmine

In October, Mr. Jamshaid quit Axact and moved to the United Arab Emirates, taking with him internal records of 22 individual customer payments totaling over $600,000.  Mr. Jamshaid has since contacted most of those customers, offering to use his knowledge of Axact’s internal protocols to obtain refunds. Several spurned his approach, seeing it as a fresh effort to defraud them. But a few, including Mohan, accepted his offer. After weeks of fraught negotiations, Axact refunded Mohan $31,300 last fall

Once the story went public – some digital forensic experts spotted some commonalitiy spread across all the Axact websites, the presence of the exact same Live Chatting app being used across all websites – all leading to the Axact Chat Server found at http://xchatlivepro.org/Login.aspx

Simply open any Axact Site – Click – Live Chat Now – view the source code and see the magic happen. Watch this quick video of randomly selected websites from NYTimes published list of Axact’s scam universities and you see how all lead to the same dead horse located on Kh-e-Ittehad

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