Diploma mill in Agropoli, false certificates for 554 people investigated throughout Italy

Salerno. A fake diploma cost between €2 and €1500: that's how much it cost to obtain a recognized qualification without ever having attended a course, bypass rankings, and secure a place in a public school.

Hundreds are under investigation in the context of an investigation by the Vallo della Lucania prosecutor's office into an alleged 'diploma mill' based in Agropoli, a renowned tourist resort in Cilento.

Investigators have estimated a million-dollar damage to the coffers of public administrations. The investigation, entrusted to the companies of the Carabinieri of Vallo della Lucania and Agropoli and the judicial police section, ended with 554 people investigated on various counts for corruption for an act contrary to the duties of office, material forgery committed by a public official in public documents and aggravated fraud against the State.

The investigation began after a report from a regional school office that some teachers, for tenure in 2018, had presented qualifications that were not only very dated but also never presented in previous competitive procedures.

At that point, the military decided to investigate why those qualifications had never been used for so many years by those who had obtained them. Thus, having acquired hundreds of suspicious diplomas throughout the country, they carried out, among other investigative activities, a documentary analysis lasting over a year, identifying over 400 documents with false signatures, false parchments and discrepancies between registers and qualifications.

The chief prosecutor of Vallo della Lucania, Antonio Ricci, in a note, emphasizes that we are faced with "a real factory of false and certainly not free qualifications". According to the investigators, the prices of each of the various qualifications that were not regular but were issued (preparatory diplomas, multipurpose specialization diplomas, professional qualification diplomas) varied from 1000 to 2.500 euros.

Those titles would have allowed numerous defendants, residents not only in Campania, to win and have better rankings in school competitions, with damages for the public administration that have been calculated at well over 7 and a half million euros.