B Anderson wrote:
> > In my case through the training courses I had to attend at Immigration
> > in order to become a visa proxy. I'm still quite amazed at the quality
> > of fake documents simple desktop publishing can cheaply come up with.
>
> How do you know the attributes of every university's certificate?

Don't need to. Every single document from every applicant is scanned
and kept. And compared. All changes need to be authenticated, so the
problem isn't the number of obscure colleges, but the quality of
forgery. And at the moment the focus isn't so much the quality of
forgery of university certificates, so much as government documents
(forged, or actual originals issued through corruption).

> Also, for privacy reasons, are uni's allowed to give out details of
> those who have graduated?

Depends on the country. Don't forget that in terms of the total number
of CoE issued, fewer than 13% are for applicants from OECD countries,
and of those very few have privacy protections as stringent as those of
the EU. Most US colleges are quite willing to give out details, even to
visa proxies such as myself. Plus the onus of proof in this case in on
the applicant, and US & European applicants are almost always ready to
sign waivers on these things.