Investigators in Pakistan have arrested the head of a technology firm accused of selling fake university degrees online.
Chief Executive Officer of Axact, Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh was arrested after investigators raided the company’s headquarters in Karachi and found thousands of blank diplomas.
Mr Shaikh led investigators to the location of the blank degrees and fake student ID cards during the course of an interrogation.
The CEO is currently in the custody of the Federal Investigation Agency and is expected to be brought before a court to be formally charged later today.
"We have now sufficient evidence against the firm and will proceed accordingly to file a case," said Shahid Hayat, an FIA official.
Two other officials said Mr Shaikh would be charged under Pakistani laws relating to fraud, cheating, money laundering, and illegal electronic money transfer.
Pakistani authorities began investigating Axact earlier this month after the New York Times accused the IT company of running a network of websites for fake universities as part of an elaborate multi-million dollar scheme.
Authorities in the capital city of Islamabad sought assistance from the FBI and Interpol in the investigation.
The "university" websites mainly routed their traffic through servers run by companies registered in Cyprus and Latvia.
Employees planted false reports about Axact universities on CNN iReport, a website for citizen journalism.
Axact had also announced plans to launch a news channel called Bol, which had hired many of Pakistan's leading TV anchors at above-market salaries.
Many of the journalists have resigned in the wake of the scandal.
