If you were a CEO, would you hire a senior-level PM with a phony degree in engineering or IT to head a multimillion project?

PM PERSPECTIVE: The foundation for a project's success rests on strong, experienced, highly competent and ethical PMs.

How would you like to get a bachelor's or master's degree or PhD with little or no work? No problem. You can have them for a fee. (PhDs, of course, cost more.)

What are degrees worth? Absolutely nothing. If you're lucky, you'll get away with the scam. But that's a dangerous game to play since employers are getting better at spotting bogus degrees.

Are fake diplomas worth losing your job and credibility? Would you hire someone with a degree that's not worth the paper it's printed on? This person would be a frontline PM, assisting in managing multimillion dollar projects. I don't have to tell you what will happen when everything goes wrong and the project blows up in your face. The person you just hired will be the first to get the proverbial heave-ho, and you'll be right behind him.

So why do college-educated professionals, many high-level executives, techies and PMs shell out millions of dollars every year for a worthless piece of sheepskin?

First, a little history. Diploma mills have been around since the Civil War. But over the past 20 years, they've become a growth industry that gets bigger every year. In 2001, diploma mills were a $200 million a year industry. In 2003--despite a slow economy--there were more than 400 diploma mills and 300 counterfeit diploma websites.

Some fake schools in Europe have made as much as $50 million a year and have as many as 15,000 "graduates" a year, according to John Bear and Allen Ezell, authors of Degree Mills: The Billion-dollar Industry That Has Sold Over A Million Fake Diplomas (Amazon, $12.92). El Cerrito, Calif.-based Bear has also written Bears' Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning (Amazon, $10.44). Ezell is a retired FBI agent who investigated diploma mills in the 1980s.

Diploma mills used to be mom-and-pop outfits. Now they're professional criminal operations, says Bear. They're high-tech, global, sophisticated and they've catapulted to more than a $500 million a year industry.

"A single phony school can earn between $10 million and $20 million annually," says Bear. A Rumanian-based school with 100 telemarketers was clearing more than $1 million a week, he adds

According to website Degreeinfo.com, a diploma mill is an unaccredited and fraudulent institution of higher education that is hard to spot initially. Typically they operate out of telephone boiler rooms with high-pressure telemarketers working the phones around the clock. The school's brochures are often slick and enticing, stressing that they are "fully accredited," "nationally accredited" or "accredited worldwide." Most always, the accrediting agencies are also phony operations.

Unscrupulous operators are routinely caught, fined and imprisoned, only to resurface again in another state or country with a new school and identity. Practically overnight, they're up and running again, making millions peddling more bogus degrees.

After tracking diploma mills for two decades, Bear has amassed a database of 2,700 schools. Here are some important facts he's gathered about these phony degree factories:

(Look for Part 2--mom-and-pop outfits to global operations. Once you know what you are looking for, diploma mills are easy to spot.)

Degree Deception (Part 1 of 3)