MANILA, Philippines—For less than P1,000, you can pass yourself off as a college graduate. That’s the promise offered by “Recto University,” the stretch of Claro M. Recto Avenue in Sta. Cruz, Manila, which has become notorious for faking official documents, including school records.
To find out just how skilled these forgers were, I decided to have my own diploma from Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU) faked. I chose a stall manned by Raymond, an eager-looking young man. The transaction was fast; he didn’t even ask why I wanted an AdMU 2007 diploma and a transcript of records to match. He simply assured me: “We’ll take care of it. We have originals to copy from for all schools, for any year.” The diploma went for P650, the package with the transcript totaled P900.
After I paid the deposit, Raymond went off to have the documents made. But he returned shortly after to report that they were having problems with the transcript. “You chose a hard course, Ma’am,” he said, letting it slip that they were just researching their data online.
I agreed to return the next day but I had yet to leave the house when Raymond texted me and asked if they could just change my course to Mass Communications (the course offered at AdMU is Communication).
As if that snafu wasn’t enough, upon pickup, the school name on the diploma read: “ATENO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY.” I asked for a do-over. After an hour, Raymond came back with the documents.
The diploma had a gold seal stamped with AdMU’s logo, complete with forged signatures, but it looked nothing like the original. For one, the real diploma is written in Latin. The signatories were also wrong. They invented a dean; the university president was from a different branch and had been dead since 1999 while the registrar was for the professional schools. A closer look also revealed that they had spelled my name wrong!
The real transcript, meanwhile, has security features “akin to that of paper money,” said an AdMU administrative assistant who refused to be named for lack of authority to speak to media. Even if the Recto forgers got the subjects and the grading system correct—which they didn’t—the AdMU transcript would be hard to fake.
Apparently, in Recto University, the buyer leads the seller. Contrary to the forgers’ claims, they wouldn’t get it right unless you were to provide them with the correct details.
Even so, “the making of fake diplomas at Recto are a recurrent problem, the peak season of which is after graduation,” Manila City legal officer Renato de la Cruz said.
For the most part, Recto University thrives because sometimes, fake documents can pass off for the real ones despite their poor quality because of a faulty verification process. Human resources management head Jose Gil Pineda, who has worked in the HR industry for 15 years, said that employers don’t really know what school records from the different universities look like.
Diploma fakers and their customers can be charged with falsification of private or public documents, said De la Cruz. These are bailable offenses but they can also land you from eight months to six years in jail, depending on the mitigating circumstances of the crime.
The AdMU employee said that the school doesn’t file criminal complaints against forgers. “We don’t feel it is in our jurisdiction [to do so],” she said. Companies don’t usually file complaints either, choosing instead to just fire the employee or reject an applicant outright, Pineda said. So what have Recto University graduates got to lose? “It does more harm than good. A ruined reputation is difficult to repair,” the AdMU employee warned.