They often have English names, because University of Brentwick sounds more sophisticated to Americans than Diplomas-R-Us.

 You find the advertisements in the back of The Economist magazine, offering you a chance to receive an advanced degree through your life experience. Or maybe you get an e-mail offering you the opportunity to pick up a "fully accredited" MBA in three weeks or less.

 Diploma mills have been around for decades. However, the business of selling degrees has expanded, thanks to the great global reach of the Internet.

 Moreover, the operators of fake schools are getting more sophisticated. When the University of Brentwick was exposed as a phony, the same people just changed the name to University of Devonshire and kept the $30 million-plus annual business rolling, said John Bear, an expert on distance learning who publishes guides to colleges both legitimate and not.

 "They have an office in London, but their e-mail comes from Romania. Their printing press is in Israel. Their bank is in Cyprus. The owner lives in Beverly Hills. Who's going to do anything about it?" Bear said.

 The British investigator assigned to the case called Bear hoping to learn that the FBI was on the case. But the FBI agent most interested in diploma mills - a Fox Mulder of the bogus sheepskin trade - recently retired, and Bear said nobody has stepped forward to replace him.

 "Everyone is saying it's not our problem," he said.

 And yet, diploma mills are everyone's problem. When the FBI was more interested, they exposed fake diploma-bearing high-school principals, ministers, corporate executives. Bear testified in a Florida case against a prison psychologist who had bought his doctorate, and he said his friend at the FBI found seven people with fake Ph.D.s at NASA. But it gets worse.

 "One diploma mill that specialized in nuclear technology safety had given more than 500 degrees," Bear said.

 Nowadays almost all diploma mills are accredited, because there are more than 100 false accrediting agencies, most of them started by the school operators themselves.

 "Sometimes they have two buttons on the phone - one for the school, and the other for the agency that accredits the school."