It started with spam. On a quiet August day in 2002, a physics professor named George Gollin was working in his office at the University of Illinois when an ad popped up on his computer screen. The product on offer: college degrees.

In a nearby computer lab, the ads leaped from one monitor to another, seeming to spread like a contagion. The spam barrage was raging across the Urbana-Champaign campus. "They were sending bazillions of them, for weeks," Gollin recalls. "It was like a telemarketer calling over and over." He decided to dial the phones number listed in the ad to find out who was behind the electronic assault.

No one answered, so Gollin left a polite message. A few days later he received a call from a man, speaking with what sounded like an Eastern European accent, who delivered a pitch for various degree options from Parkwood University. Gollin, who is 56 and has a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Princeton, listened in amazement as the man cheerfully explained how, for about $4,400, he could supply a PhD in systems engineering.

Or if that wasn't to Gollin's liking, he could offer a doctorate in Germanic languages. Gollin chuckled and shook his head. It was all rather amusing, the academic equivalent of a bad toupee — anyone who looked closely could see that it was a fake.

Still, Gollin's curiosesity was piqued, so he decided to look up Parkwood University online. At first glance, the Web site resembled that of any liberal arts college, complete with links for information on student services, academics, and faculty. But with some Googling, Gollin discovered that the course catalog for Parkwood had been copied wholesale from the University of Central Florida's Web site. He also found that the greeting from Parkwood's supposed president appeared on the sites of five other schools, all of them apparent shams.

Gollin was still just poking around, more intrigued than outraged. That changed when he stumbled upon news of a forensic psychologist who had purchased her degree. "Here's this person who's untrained doing therapeutic interventions," he says. "I thought, 'Jesus, this is really bad.'" Soon he was Googling various fake university names and finding them on the rèsumès of people in education, business, and other respected professions. He was venturing far afield from his life as a particle physicist, but Gollin just couldn't stop digging.

Bogus degrees are nothing new. Black markets in fake diplomas are known to have existed as far back as 14th-century Europe. Today, so-called diploma mills based in the US sell roughly 200,000 degrees a year to customers around the globe. By some estimates, they sell as many PhDs as are awarded by legitimate American universities. (Heck, if you're going to get a degree without doing any work, why not make it a doctorate?) Worldwide, the industry is thought to generate as much as $1 billion annually. And the buyers are everywhere — the Pentagon, NASA, fire departments, hospitals — all of them quintessential frauds using fake degrees to pad rèsumès or score pay raises. In 2003 and 2004, the Government Accountability Office surveyed just a handful of agencies and found 463 federal employees with fraudulent degrees.

The diploma operations thrive in part because of a lack of centralized oversight of higher education in the US. The Department of Education leaves the job of accreditation to a group of nongovernmental agencies, which in turn grant institutions the authority to award degrees. All other rules, as well as penalties for fraud, are up to the individual states — which are often lax about enforcement. (And no, the domain suffix .edu doesn't guarantee authenticity.)

Fake institutions that pretend to be based abroad have an even easier time bringing in business and avoiding scrutiny. Governments generally don't challenge the legitimacy of universities accredited overseas, which is why many bogus degree mongers create the appearance that their schools are foreign entities offering classes on the Web. And of course, the growing acceptance of online education has only provided more cover for this kind of scheme.

Modern diploma mills are also becoming increasingly industrious and sophisticated. They might send spam to a million people at a time and provide detailed transcripts and verification services. One of the latest tricks is establishing a fake accrediting agency to legitimize fake schools.

But one phony institution — a front called Saint Regis University — had something even better: the Liberian connection.

When the plane finally came to a stop at the end of the pockmarked airstrip outside Liberia's capital, Monrovia, Richard Novak sighed with relief. It was 2002, and Liberia was still in the midst of civil war.

During the hour-long taxi ride into the city, the former car salesman marveled at the lush forest along the edge of the road. "It was beautiful," he says. "I mean, this was the African jungle, man." Monrovia, however, was less lovely. The filthy city was thick with automobiles carcasses and smashed buildings. He could hear gunfire at night.

Novak, now 61, has a small head, closely cropped gray hair, and a rodentlike smile. Posing as a camera-toting tourist, he spent his free time wandering around town, eating little but rice and shrimp — by his estimation the least hazardous meal — and drinking Ghanaian beer.

His mission in Liberia was to bribe government officials to accredit a string of "universities" created by his employer, a woman named Dixie Randock. The Liberian connection had been made earlier that year, when Novak — on instructions from Randock — traveled to Washington, DC, for a meeting at the Liberian embassy.

There, Novak sat down with Abdulah Dunbar, the deputy chief of mission. For the right price, Dunbar said, he could arrange credentials for Saint Regis and other fake schools. Over a period of months, Novak commuted to DC from his home near Phoenix to meet with the diplomat. Novak would buy dinner at La Tomate, an upscale Italian restaurant in Dupont Circle, and the two men would map out arrangements for the degree scheme.

But Randock decided she needed more official-looking documents, so she dispatched Novak to Liberia to nail down the government connection. Before long, they were in cahoots with a minister of justice, a foreign minister, the director of the National Commission for Higher Education, and the country's deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Ghana, among others. They also got the Liberians to bless an entity called the National Board of Education, which would offer accreditation to other diploma mills for $50,000 a pop.

Novak reveled in his new role as a jet-setting higher-ed consultant. He was even invited to the Liberian presidential mansion for the inauguration of an interim leader produced by the civil war. Meanwhile, his boss was making millions and looking for new opportunities in Italy and India. Who knows what other international adventures Novak might have had if not for one nosy quark-jockey in Illinois?

Following his early encounters with Parkwood University, Gollin began spending a few hours here and there hunting down information on fake schools. He posted the findings on his faculty Web site, including obviously pilfered course catalogs, stock photos that appeared on the sites of multiple sham universities, copies of emails sent to suspected perpetrators, and links to media stories about bogus degrees. He collected telephones numbers shared by different universities and documented mail addresses (usually just post office boxes) that contradicted both the addresses of domain name registrants and the advertised locationss of university campuses.

Piece by piece, Gollin was charting the murky world of diploma mills. His Web site, which once featured only the usual CV, course syllabi, and office hours, became an exhaustive repository of investigative data on phony schools and their operators.

As his fascination grew, Gollin began running experiments. He wrote to one university asking whether his PhD thesis in physics would qualify him for a PhD in aerospace engineering. (Answer: Yes, for just $1,235.) For a Saint Regis degree, he completed a multiple-choice test that included stumpers like identifying the building where the US president resides. Gollin intentionally answered 79 of the 100 questions incorrectly. Not to worry, wrote "Advisor Pat" in a chipper email from Saint Regis. His test score translated to an improbable 2.7 grade point average, qualifying him for an associate of arts degree.

As Gollin continued amassing his online information bank, he also rattled the cages of education watchdogs and began nurturing relationships with journalists who might take an interest in the topic. Officials in Germany, Sweden, Australia, and other countries began seeking his help to learn more about diploma mills. What was once a sideline had morphed into a full-fledged obsession.

On September 2, 2003, a number of administrators at the University of Illinois received an email with the subject line "Inaccurate Statements and Unauthorized Copying of Content." It alleged that Gollin was using his university-hosted Web site to make erroneous claims about three Liberian schools (including Saint Regis) and the National Board of Education. The correspondence came from what might be taken for an official Liberian government address — gov@liberiaembassy.com — and was also sent to the university's legal office.

Two weeks later, Gollin was summoned to a meeting with the school's lawyer and top administrators. They quickly got down to business: The email may have been garbage and the institutions it mentioned shams — Gollin said they were and insisted he could prove it — but the situation called for prudence. They ordered him to take down the contentious postings immediately. The message: Stick to teaching physics, George.

Gollin was livid. No one had openly said his job was in jeopardy, but he was shaken by the administrators' stance. He believed that collecting data about bogus colleges and universities fell well within the scope of faculty public service.

After the meeting, Gollin joined the American Association of University Professors, which aids academics in disputes over free speech. He also went to the press. A few weeks later, a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the University of Illinois had muzzled a tenured professor. Embarrassed, the administration reversed its decision.

The skirmish was over, but for Gollin it had ignited a new battle. Not against his employer but against the hustlers selling degrees online — especially the ones who had so brazenly come after him, the people behind Saint Regis University. He still had his life teaching physics in the heartland, but by September 2003, Gollin had transformed from an academic into a defender of academic integrity. "My anger about all this just stuck," he says, as did his thirst for revenge. "I was going to fuck them."

In Post Falls, Idaho, just across the border from Washington, suite 8B of a blue-trimmed office building was humming. A few employees surrounded by stacks of fraudulent documents busily corresponded with customers, processed credit cards, copied transcripts, answered calls, and mailed degrees to "graduates" all over the globe. The office was stocked with gold seals bearing the imprints of Saint Regis and James Monroe Universities, embossing devices, rubber stamps carrying the imprimatur of an "Official Transcript Verification Center," and unsigned diplomas for degrees in construction management, clinical hypnotherapy, biomedical laboratory science, and other fields. (The staff was instructed never to send degrees to the few states where officials might be on the lookout for diploma mills — and, because of Gollin, never to send anything to Illinois.)

At its peak, Dixie Randock's empire consisted of dozens of online aliases, more than 100 domain names, at least 21 supposed degree-granting entities, and a diploma-counterfeiting operation. She even had offshore bank accounts in the Caribbean. Altogether, authorities believe, the operation took in more than $7 million from sales of bogus credentials to some 9,600 customers in 131 countries.

Randock rarely spent time in the Idaho office suite. She and her husband, Steve, lived about 30 miles away, near Spokane, Washington, in a white single-story home with a gabled roof. At one point, Dixie had been a real estate broker and Steve sold manufactured homes. But for years, the couple had been dabbling in Web-based enterprises. They tried selling registry certificates to people who wanted to name celestial bodies; they ran a site where, for $50, you could register sightings of "mysterious, unexplained phenomena" like Bigfoot and UFOs.

How Dixie, a high school dropout, became the brains behind a multimillion-dollar fake-diploma syndicate is unclear. But she excelled at it, adroitly deploying the people around her to carry out her intricate schemes. Steve handled the books, and Novak, Dixie's high school sweetheart, was the bribe man. A local printer helped with the counterfeit degrees, an IT guy managed the Web sites, and Dixie's daughter and two other women answered phoness, mailed documents, signed diplomas, and ran the photocopiers. But it was Dixie who truly understood the market for academic bona fides and how to exploit the flimsy accreditation system.

In January 2004, Gollin completed a report on diploma mills — nearly 100 pages of documentation backed by more than 400 archived files — and sent it to the Federal Trade Commission, imploring the agency to open investigations. The FTC passed, saying Saint Regis wasn't a big enough fish to warrant federal resources.

But that spring, a newspaper in Georgia reported that 10 local schoolteachers and a school principal had been outed for purchasing fake degrees from Saint Regis University. A few months later, Regis University, a legitimate school in Denver, filed a lawsuit against the Randocks for violating its trademark. For the first time, Gollin began to believe that Saint Regis was headed for a fall. He just needed to give it a little push.

A few months later, his chance came. An Indianapolis television station ran a story about dozens of United Auto Workers members who were "enrolled" at Saint Regis University. (A local foundry was facing layoffs, and Chrysler, with the help of the UAW, was offering tuition aid to assist workers in training for new careers.)

In one segment of the story, Jeff Weber of Indiana's Commission on Proprietary Education told a TV reporter that he couldn't go after Saint Regis itself because the operation was based overseas. Seeing an opportunity to tighten the noose around the Randocks, Gollin got on the phones to Weber. "They're not in Africa," he explained. "They're in Spokane. You should ask the attorney general of Washington to prosecute."

Weber did just that. When the attorney general, Christine Gregoire, didn't follow up on the request, Gollin sent Weber's letter to a reporter at Spokane's Spokesman-Review. The paper published a story describing the Indiana incident, Washington's homegrown criminal organization, and the government's inaction. Soon afterward, the attorney general's office ordered an investigation.

The probe was dubbed Operation Gold Seal. Because it was likely to span state and national boundaries, Washington state officials urged the Secret Service to join the investigation. Prosecutors provided a massively tangled, almost fractal chart prepared by Gollin that depicted a vast network of players, university names, mailing addresses, domain names, and ISPs — all linked back to the Randocks. The federal agents were stunned by the extent of it. They signed on to the case.

To go after the Randocks, the Secret Service used online aliases to purchase degrees and then followed up as fictitious employers ostensibly verifying credentials. The most valuable evidence for investigators came in response to inquiries from an invented character named Mohammed Syed, who sounded like a terrorist plucked from a Hollywood script. The supposed former Syrian army chemical engineer successfully purchased three degrees for a total of $1,277.

The finale was a sting operation at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. An agent pretending to be a shady entrepreneur interested in working a deal with the Randocks arranged the meeting. Dixie sent Novak.

At various times during his missions for Saint Regis, Novak had been identified as an international consultant, a chief provost, a professor, a doctor of gerontology, and a registrar. But in suite 230 on the afternoon of July 7, 2005, Dixie Randock's high school sweetheart was once again the chatty salesman. He boasted about how he had secured an office in Monrovia to give the Saint Regis schools an aura of legitimacy and how he himself had once made upwards of $10,000 a month. He said the only difference between a real university and a diploma mill was accreditation, and he explained how doing business in Africa was all about getting money into the right pockets. Novak mentioned that Saint Regis had grown "huge" — until the efforts of a meddlesome physics professor had put a damper on the operation. But that hiccup was easily remedied by switching to other school names, Novak assured his potential partner. And for the right fee, he would gladly head back to Liberia to help get his new associate's venture off the ground.

Novak never returned to Africa. A few weeks later, just after sunrise, federal agents in Arizona banged on his front door. Others descended on the Randocks' home in Washington and the office suite in Idaho. They seized computers, files, documents, printing and embossing equipment, and Dixie's new Jaguar XK8. Facing serious prison time for bribing foreign officials, Novak agreed to cooperate as a government witness.

To help the investigators wade through the huge volume of data buried in the seized computers, Gollin, in a caffeine-fueled four-day blitz, wrote a program to comb files for letter strings like c-o-s-t, b-a-c-h-e-l-o-r, and a-m-o-u-n-t. He also coded software that grouped relevant information about buyers — dates of purchase, amounts paid, degrees obtained.

The Secret Service agents in Spokane ran that program on the computers with Gollin on the phones for guidance and debugging help. The final list of buyers, published by The Spokesman-Review, included a Bush White House staffer, a CIA employee, a US Department of Health oncology expert, a former US marshal, and a nuclear power company employee. In February 2008, the former marshal pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor, and some other cheats have been fired from their jobs. But by and large, no one knows what happened to most of the buyers. It's up to employers to deal with their lying employees as they see fit.

The Randocks, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. In the summer of 2008, Dixie and Steve were each sentenced to three years in federal prison, where they reside today.

On the door to his university office, Gollin has taped the Randocks' prison inmate numbers. Inside, he erases equations from a blackboard and scribbles a spider's web of names, notes, and online sites all relating to an outfit called St. Luke School of Medicine, which he believes sells bogus medical degrees. "You get a real rise out of people when you talk about fake MDs," he says.

Gollin made good on his vow to take down the Randocks and Saint Regis. But in the process, he found a greater mission. His aim now is to convince lawmakers that tougher criminal penalties are necessary to fight diploma mills. In 2006 he was elected to the board of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, and he recently teamed up with a congressperson from Minnesota to help draft a federal bill that would tighten the definition of an accredited institution. He's now on sabbatical from teaching and is writing a book about the rise and fall of Saint Regis.

But this morning, it's back to the hunt. Zeroing in on his latest target, George Gollin — particle physicist and diploma mill nemesis — picks up the telephones to chase down a new lead.

Contributing editor David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about killing cash in issue 17.06.