- I got into this business by accident. I was 15 years old when I met a man named Sergey, he was much older than me, one of the founders of the diploma business, now his experience in this business is more than 28 years. And then he needed helpers
- bring materials and distribute documents to clients. He asked: do you want to earn some extra money? Of course, I needed the money then, and I agreed.
At first I worked for him as a courier. Then he spun up and became a dealer. That is, I took orders over the phone, organized the production of documents, met with clients, or hired couriers for delivery. Of course, to achieve success in this market, you need special qualities - attention to customers, accuracy in order execution, honesty and integrity.
In general, our market has a clear hierarchy. Let's say that there are about ten business founders "at the top", such as Sergey. They organize all the processes of making diplomas. Everyone has from 10 to 50 sites that pop up on the Internet at the request "Buy a diploma". In fact, there are not 500 or 1000 sites, but much more. You can create a website and promote it for 5 thousand rubles. And this is done by everyone who is not lazy, including all sorts of crooks. And who the client will run into, they will deceive him, sell him a cheap fake printed on a printer, or a high-quality document - this is who will be lucky.
The second level is dealers, each business owner has 10-15 dealers. Most of them are his friends and acquaintances. Dealers also have their own websites. Dealers can be large or small in terms of turnover, but they have not yet been promoted. I was rather average, I had my own website and even advertising on the Internet. Not cool, like some people, but it was.
Earnings from major dealers — hundreds of thousands of rubles a week. They receive money, however, not daily, but 2-3 times a week, when they deliver diplomas to clients. I used to have days when I had to deliver 20 orders at a time. Once I delivered 40 diplomas-from six in the morning until the next morning. And each diploma - 15-20 thousand rubles. This was in 2011. So consider what our income was like. The dealer gives part of the earned money to the owner.
At the bottom are couriers, these are friends and acquaintances of the dealer, guys who want to earn extra money. They receive 3-4 thousand rubles from the document delivered to the client. The dealer may have 10-20 couriers.
Although there is a clear hierarchy in the market, this does not mean that one does one thing and the other does another. The host can accept orders and execute them. The dealer himself can travel around the city to deliver documents to customers.
The money turnover of the fake diploma market is huge. It is impossible to even give an approximate figure. Because each dealer has its own price for each diploma. I am talking now about dealers who work in good faith, that is, they sell hand-made diplomas. The labor costs for each document are different.
You can make a diploma on a real Goznak letterhead, it will be expensive, 120-150 thousand rubles. You can write the desired text and put a stamp on an excellent photocopy, it costs 10 times cheaper. You can make photocopies with watermarks that only a professional printer can distinguish from the real ones.
And there are also unscrupulous dealers. These print out the diploma on a color printer and sell it as specially made. As a rule, the client cannot distinguish between documents. And he buys them in the same way as the diplomas of bona fide dealers. But I don't remember there being any showdowns between the two. There is enough space in the market for everyone. I can say that its monetary volume is comparable to the drug market.
We have strict rules that everyone must follow. For example, you can't fake doctors ' diplomas. They also treat us and our relatives. It's terrible to think what will happen if you get such a healer. It is also strictly forbidden to forge diplomas of civil aviation pilots. Many people may be affected. There used to be a ban on law degrees, but then the founding fathers lifted it.
About Wizards
Separately in the diploma business there are master-professionals. There are very few of them. They make seals, forge signatures, and fill out diploma forms. This is a special art. I know two masters in Moscow, they first worked together, but then they separated. One of them did everything completely by himself, it was the only such person on the market. And he filled out order forms for almost half of the dealers.
I knew another master in Krasnodar. When all the craftsmen in Moscow were busy, he was given forms by train. He filled them out and sent them back in the same way. We managed to do it in three days, and this is exactly the production time we promised our customers. These three provide 70 percent of orders for diplomas in Moscow.
I once saw a person filling out forms at work. There was an order for a diploma of a Ukrainian university in 1988. And in such diplomas, the text is in Ukrainian on the left, and in Russian on the right. So this master wrote simultaneously with his left and right hands in two languages.
When filling out forms, you need to know a lot. And what tone in which year in which university ink or ink was used. How thick were the pens or ballpoint pens. A very important point is errors in the text. The secretaries who filled out the diplomas are not very competent, apparently, their diplomas are also of our manufacture. And these mistakes must be accurately repeated, because the personnel officers of enterprises also know about them and will immediately detect a fake. Completing the forms correctly is 90 percent successful.
A special art is signature forgery. I knew one person who just had to look at a signature for 3 to 5 seconds, and he reproduced it so accurately that it was impossible to distinguish it from the original.
The seals must also be very precisely made. Moreover, the seals of the same university were different in different years. In Moscow, there was a master who supplied seals to all major "diploma holders". When I was a courier, I always went to meet him at the same place, at the Kuntsevo station. He used to make appointments 6-7 times a day.
It is clear that samples must be collected for the production of diplomas and seals. My eldest, Sergey, had a collection of diplomas and seals. Imagine a wall-length cabinet with hundreds of small drawers, like a library catalog. More than 10 thousand seals of universities, schools, and colleges were stored there. Sergey collected about 15 thousand signatures of university and school employees. And a huge number of original documents.
I didn't collect the originals myself, but Sergey told me that he had been saving them for many years. Sometimes I bought them directly from the owners, who sold them for next to nothing in difficult times. Sometimes I picked up lost diplomas on the street or in some institution. Sometimes dealers or couriers also brought back purchased or lost items. It's easier now. Graduates scan their new diplomas, send them to us by e-mail, and we transfer 2-3 thousand rubles to their bank cards. This is also an additional income for them.
About clients
There are two large groups of our clients. The first group consists of people over 35 years of age, 40 percent of them. They have been working for some company or enterprise for a long time. And they need the document to settle formal relations with the employer. For example, an instruction comes out that there should be an employee with a higher education in such a position. And a person holding such a position is a good specialist. But they say to him: bring a university diploma. And the person calls us: help. Of course, we will help him.
The second large group is people under 30 years of age. They studied at universities, but for various reasons did not graduate. For example, they left their final year. And after a few years, they decide to get a diploma. There are also about 40 percent of them. But many people make a mistake. They order a diploma from the university where they studied. And even the year when they were supposed to be released. Such a diploma is quite easy to calculate.
The remaining 10 percent of customers are also divided into two small groups. The first group includes young people under the age of 22. As a rule, these are guys from the regions who came to study in Moscow. But they were expelled due to poor academic performance. However, the time of graduation is approaching, and they need at least to show their diploma to their parents via Skype, who have been sending money to study for 4 or 5 years. Well, how can you not help such guys?
And the last category is guys who are very sorry. They're older. We studied honestly, passed all subjects, received diplomas, but lost them. And universities tell them that they don't give out duplicates, because they can't find records of what they studied. Or maybe they just want to take money from the guys. Here are people in trouble, and they also need help.
There is a lot of confusion in universities. There are some cases where it is impossible to make ends meet, especially in cases from 10-20 years ago. They say that in 2013 and 2014 there was more order, I don't know, I was already out of business then.
About Goznak forms and "completed diplomas"
On the Internet, customers are offered a "Goznak diploma", that is, printed at the Goznak factory. Do we have Goznak forms freely available on the market? No, of course not. Yes, we do not work with the factories of Goznak that print diplomas. Everything is under strict control there, every form is registered, when it was printed, to whom it was sent.
But we make Goznak diplomas. There are only a few of them, about 2 percent of all honestly produced documents. For such a form, an original seal is ordered (taking into account the year when the diploma was issued), and the original signature is put, not a facsimile. Of course, we do not run to the rector for a signature, our masters do this, but they do it very efficiently. Making such a diploma takes 2-3 days.
And we buy authentic Goznak forms from universities. They usually receive new forms at the beginning of the year. And then some of the forms are sold to us. Basically, these forms are slightly damaged. Ink dripped somewhere, and something else. But the university employees themselves do this so that the forms can be written off according to the act and sold to us at 40-50 thousand apiece. On the market, such diplomas cost 150-200 thousand rubles.
And our second communication with universities happens in June, when it's time to graduate. It happens that universities that used to sell us forms don't have enough of them now. They call us and ask us to make forms. They are not allowed to contact the printing house, because they will have questions about where to put the forms. Well, of course, we meet universities halfway, we make so-called forms of maximum quality for them. Such forms are very difficult to distinguish from the real ones.
There are universities that sell forms more than others at the beginning of the year and buy them from us in the summer. More precisely, so-sold when I was engaged in this business. I can name two. The first is the Moscow Forestry Engineering University in Mytishchi. There was a fire there in 2006, all the documentation was burned down. Since then, this university has surpassed all state universities in terms of fake diplomas. We even sent our own requests there, for example, asking whether such and such a person studied with them or not.
But the First Professional University was the worst of all. There, I know, graduates used to be unable to get their diplomas for months, waiting until November, December or even January, because the forms intended for them were sold. My senior Sergey had a list of public and private universities selling forms, there are more than 500 of them all over the country.
To receive Goznak forms, we do not need to be friends with the rector or vice-rector. A secretary or even a security guard is enough. I think that most of the university leaders we work with don't even know what's going on with their diploma forms.
We have no contacts with the Ministry of Education and Science, nor with Rosobrnadzor. We don't need it at all. Now many clients want to buy, as they call it, a "spent diploma". That is, a diploma entered in some register of documents in Rosobrnadzor. I think that breaking into this registry is a complete stupidity. First of all, it contains data on graduates of the last 3 years only. Some in the market wring a lot of money for the "conducted diploma". In fact, this is a deception of the client, but he will not be able to check in any way whether his diploma was entered in the register or not.
Now there is a new scheme that does not apply for a diploma in the register, but for a specific person in the university. We give the client a first higher education diploma (from any university). And we send the client for a second education to the university where we have friends. He is enrolled in the final year. He can go to classes, or he can not go as he wants. But in a year, he will receive a completely legitimate document on the second higher education, which he will present to the personnel officer at the place of work. This is a real university-registered document.
When I was working, I received 3-4 orders a month from abroad - from Europe, America, and perhaps most of all from Israel. But they were our compatriots who needed Russian diplomas. Their employers would be surprised to find out what kind of diplomas they are presented with.
About the fight against diploma holders
The most active years of our business were 2011 and 2012. Then there was a surge in demand. Our profit has increased dramatically. And that's when we ran into the police. No, they didn't close our business, they didn't bring cases under the article on forgery of documents to court. They were just siphoning money out of us. By the end of the 12th year, almost every dealer paid the police 100 thousand rubles a month. A year later, this amount increased to 300-400 thousand rubles. People were given a choice: either you pay, or we make a "test purchase".
I'll explain what it is. Someone calls under the guise of a client, orders a diploma. Then, when the goods are handed over, it turns out that he is a police officer. The fact of a control purchase gives the right to seize the phone, close the site, conduct a search, take all equipment, seals, letterheads, etc.and initiate criminal proceedings. But I don't think it ever came to that.
Sometimes dealers are caught on the street or in the subway with ready-made documents. In such cases, it is necessary to say that you are just a courier, you were given diplomas, each one is wrapped in a newspaper and the address is written with the last name, to whom to transfer and how much money to receive. Who the dealer is, you don't know, he calls you and gives you diplomas. And his phone number is classified. After 3-4 hours, having selected all the money, the person was released.
At the beginning of the 13th year, I got to such a "control purchase". After that, I left the business. And then I got a call, ordered a diploma and set up a meeting place in the subway. I arrive, and two people meet me and show me documents that they are from the police. I had already delivered orders for 200 thousand rubles, and there were still diplomas for the same amount. They put me in a car and started scaring me with Article 239 of the Criminal Code. They said we'd take you to the police station, draw up a report, detain you, and then go to court.
I already knew (the guys told me) what to do. I said: take the money you've already received from your customers. They agreed. And more than that. They themselves offered to take me to other clients to get another 200 thousand. I spent four hours driving around Moscow in a police car with them, meeting with clients, receiving money and handing it over to these two people.
There was only one demonstrative police strike on our business, in 2012. Mask shows descended on the apartment of a man who supplied seals to the whole of Moscow. They broke in, broke machines, destroyed furniture, and held my wife and children at gunpoint. It was all shown on TV. But, as in all other cases, the police released everyone. After all, no one really wants this business to close.
And many of us wonder why this business still works. We discussed this topic with the guys. If the state wanted to, it would have covered us up long ago. But it's obviously interested in us being there. Otherwise, those who milk us will lose their income. After all, how many people are fed from our business. Most importantly, our customers need us. We're not looking for them, they're looking for us. And we have very high-ranking clients who receive free diplomas on Goznak letterheads. This is our defense. We can also call where we need to go if there is an unauthorized hit-and-run.
