A fake law degree from a university law lecturer?

A real-world OSINT case, and how-to OSINT investigation methodology

In this article I want to give an insight into my open source investigation method for others to learn from, and get an insight into the inner workings and ambiguities that need to be navigated. As an example I am going to investigate a public figure and their academic background. This will be Caroline Varin who is a former intelligence analyst turned university lecturer. She runs a think tank and outreach organization called professors without borders. But how did I get to her?

Back in 2020  disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones exposed professor and think tank founder Mitchell Belfer as a fraudster with a fake PhD. Based off of that I discovered another PhD faker in his circle, Yan St-Pierre. I googled Mitchell Belfer’s name to see what he has been up to and discovered that he has recently published a chapter in a book edited by Caroline Varin. The book also has a chapter by Yan-St-Pierre that seems to have been cancelled somewhere along the publishing process.

That is a high degree of association with fraudulent academics. And the new book has chapters by many of Belfer’s sketchy associates. So there appears to be a more solid connection and I will be all over her academic record for that reason.

Searching for the names “Mitchell Belfer” and “Caroline Varin” together, I find that she was on the board of Belfer’s academic journal CEJISS. I find that out by searching for cejiss.org on archive.org and navigating my way through website archives of the editorial board page to see when her name pops up first.

Caroline Varin is a university lecturer, and cofounder of a charity and appears to champion women’s rights. What could possess an educated progressive like Ms Varin to maintain a friendship and professional relationship with conservative dark-money lobbyist Mr Belfer? It’s either going to be money, a relationship, or she sympathizes with him for some reason. I want to follow the hunch that she may have a fake degree herself. A fake degree, I have found, is often just a symptom of a much wider pattern of deception. Sometimes the means to achieving some type of unsavoury goal. So with this suspicious mindset, I am going to investigate further.

As you can see, I am instantly analyzing my findings to inform my next search approach. Some people have recently suggested that information itself is not OSINT, but I argue that a targeted query is certainly in itself a type of intelligence. In the pre-internet age, information may have come in batches, which were then analyzed and decisions made based on that, leading to the classic intelligence cycle. In my investigations I go through many partial iterations of this intelligence cycle before arriving with a presentable outcome.

I’m going to look at Caroline Varin’s resume. Her LinkedIn profile can be accessed from a sockpuppet account. And her university page lists a shorter version of her timeline. So I am going to use these two and try to verify her academic career. I won’t be able to get her consent for degree verification from the universities involved, but I will likely be able to find this out on my own.

PhD Check

She names the university that she has the PhD from, which saves me a lot of work. I search for the university’s dissertation database. Her name and thesis come up immediately. At this point I cross-check to see if the style and language of her writing matches her other publications to gauge if this could have been ghostwritten by someone else or if any unusual patterns emerge.

Christopher Coker seems to be the thesis advisor, so I am going to have a look to see that the thesis topic aligns with his area of expertise. And it does look like he is involved in a wide range of activities along her thesis topic. He is also involved in a research center in the UAE and when I poke around their website I find that they aim to “influence international opinion”. That immediately rings alarm bells as the UAE potentially paying a researcher to further their political aims BUT that’s a huge tangent that I could spend way too much time chasing after.

And the PhD seems to check out overall. The references and reference dates from South Africa align with her LinkedIn claims for being there at that time. This looks to be the real deal, full genuine effort. And from my own experience doing these investigations, real degrees can be verified rather quickly. So I am gonna move on to the next one.

LLM Check

The next one is the LLM degree from Bologna. An advanced law degree in International and European law, a Masters of Law. This presupposes an undergraduate law degree, or LLB, that she doesn’t seem to have. Her LinkedIn profile gives the dates of attendance as 2008-2008, and she was busy being in the Swiss armed forces until July that year, which would leave a single semester to complete the degree.

On her university webpage she claims to have done the armed service in 2009-2010. After checking her PhD, I know that can’t be true as she would have been very busy in her first year of her PhD and would not have time to do a residential stint as a soldier in Switzerland at that time. It seems unlikely she could have gotten her degree in 12 weeks but there are all sorts of degrees out there. This is where I check the university of Bologna website. And while they do seem to have an LLM degree program, it’s two years. They also offer a master degree and 12 week courses.

It doesn’t look like she has the LLM degree at this point as the degree is two years and she did not spend two years in Bologna. I could leave it be at this point and consider the job done but what is my degree of certainty? For quality control purposes and to counter any potential excuses, I have to play devil’s advocate and try to refute my own claim.

After gaining an understanding of the website structure as it is today, I go to archive.org and try to find the same information from 2008. That is a long time ago and the website structure will have changed, so I cannot simply look for older versions of the same websites. After poking around, I find a web page that shows the program offering in 2008. There is a master program. Could this be the Italian equivalent to an LLM degree? I am using the “Simple Translate” addition to my browser to translate anything.

I realize that I have to dive into the Italian education system to understand the different degrees and the system of university education. At this point I contacted the university and after some back and forth they point me to a useful diagram on their website.

The Italians have a master degree that is a vocational course of study, sometimes called professional master. This is wholly separate from a so called second cycle degree that would be the equivalent of a Master’s degree in other countries. A check on the University of Bologna’s website shows they offer a one-year “professional master” degree. A degree unique to Italy that does not confer any academic title. The university also offers 12-week vocational law programs, again without academic title. If Ms Varin completed anything at Bologna, it could at most be a vocational course.

As an additional check I see if anyone else on LinkedIn claims to have gotten an LLM from Unibo in 2008 or thereabouts, using the number range operator.

I am limiting myself to Google for this exercise but in a more formal investigation, one would ideally want to use multiple search engines.

There are multiple people that seem to have taken this course that she did and even one in the following year, who describe this as a one semester study, but none of them claim to have gotten an LLM degree out of it. Instead, it suggests that the course of study is an Italian master degree, which does not confer any academic title.

As a career academic, Ms Varin would be keenly aware of this distinction and there would be no excuse for her to claim otherwise.

I now have multiple redundancies that strongly suggest she did not earn an LLM degree in Bologna:

-        An LLM at Unibo is and has been 2 years, or 120 educational credits

-        Any second cycle degree is 60 educational credits, or one year of study minimum.

-        No one else on LinkedIn claims an LLM degree from that year or course of study

-        Unibo website from 2008 does not mention an LLM degree that can be gained in one semester

I look back at the Unibo website from 2006 and find a reference to the Italian professional master, and an indirect mention of an LLM program on a related website. This also seems to confirm that the one semester course in International and European Law was only a part of the LLM program not the entirety of it, and therefore someone taking only one semester would not have received an LLM.

I go back to her LinkedIn profile to double-check something: What if she lied about her other activities, the Master’s degree at LSE and the military service. At that point she would have had time to complete an LLM in Bologna. But there is strong evidence for her presence in London at LSE around the time she claims her Master’s there, so I dismiss that possibility.

Now that I am reasonably confident Ms Varin has not been entirely truthful about her academic past, I want to preserve this volatile information that may be removed at any time. I save the Linkedin page as HTML, and save a screenshot of this info, and save her university page in archive.org. There are other services that will create a forensically verifiable archive of a website for legal purposes. Fiddling around, letting the info settle, and doing this on my own part time, I am about two weeks into the investigation at this point. That includes a lot of research that I haven’t presented here.

Claiming to have an LLM invokes the idea that the person has gone through a long course of study of law, yet here we have Ms Varin apparently having taken a 12-week course at most. The motivations for this claim of an LLM degree are still unclear, so I go back into her academic career to see if there is anything obvious.

Motivations

I see that she has taught undergraduate courses in law at two different universities, all with a maximum of a 12-week course of study in law.

Looking at her previous lecture activity at the Richmond, American International University in London I find someone who taught the same or similar course before her. This person has a full undergraduate, graduate and even a doctorate in law. So perhaps her motivation for claiming an LLM degree was to have this additional qualification to set her apart from other candidates to gain a teaching position.

Another discrepancy is the title she held at Richmond, The American International University in London. On her LinkedIn profile and in her biography at Regent’s she claims she held the title of “Adjunct Professor”. At this university this would mean that she has already been awarded a full professorship and is now working as an adjunct. A check of a syllabus from that time reveals that she was actually an “adjunct assistant professor”, a title ranking that lies between “adjunct lecturer” and “adjunct associate professor” at this university, two promotions and perhaps 10 years of work lower than what she claims on her own resume. This also appears to be a wild exaggeration of her academic accomplishments and for someone who works in academia and knows better, not justifiable at all.

Looking at Regents University on Wikipedia I find that the university only started giving out degrees in 2014, just when Ms Varin was hired. It appears their degree verification process had not been set up at the time of her hiring and she was therefore able to make the degree and professorship rank claims unchecked.

Clearly, there appears to be a pattern of academic deception that may not go unnoticed with entities needing to ask her for favors.

Professors Without Borders

I am going to have a look at Professors Without Borders, the organization Ms Varin founded, to see if there is anything hiding in plain sight there. It was founded in 2016, well after she had started at Regent’s. A charity but also a think tank. The financials don’t look too hot. So where does the money come from? Two organizations with ties to the Gulf region.

This stands out because Professors Without Borders program has nothing at all to do with that region. Looking into it, the organizations also have nothing to do with Ms Varin’s cause. Why would they give her money? I see that the Gulf Futures Center is an established organization. But Bridge The Gulf cannot be found immediately except for a defunct Twitter account. Their goal of bridging the gap between the UK and GCC countries is at odds with what Professors Without Borders does. James Monckton is the representative. I find that he actually worked at Verbalisation, a very expensive marketing and reputation management firm at the time, now called Enigma Strategic Communications that does “verbal engineering” for state governments. Bridge the Gulf was also never registered as an organization in the UK, and was only active for about 6 months in 2018. Its website didn’t live long enough to be archived. So it seems it was more of a 6-month marketing campaign paid for by gulf countries than an actual authentic organization.

Gulf countries don’t spend money without something in return and Ms Varin must be well aware of this with her background as an intelligence analyst. The Gulf connection ties in with Mitchell Belfer who is a GCC government lobbyist, and perhaps her thesis advisor’s Chris Coker’s gulf connections to this questionable outfit in the UAE that wants to be a global influence organization. Maybe she has more to hide than her academic background alone.

I will conclude the investigation here. I left out the personal information on Ms Varin’s family from Facebook, Instagram and other sources. But that is also an important aspect in an investigation because a spouse or parent may be a significant professional influence or indicate someone’s inclinations.

Another aspect I left out are email addresses. When I do find an email address, I normally check it against leak websites, and run it through Spiderfoot to see where else on the web this person has been active. That may yield usernames, passwords, and further information.

How to Use the Information

Now, what can we do with this type of information? I am personally satisfied that Ms Varin made some false claims on her academic career. And it does appear that these claims were made knowingly and deliberately over an extended period of time. But if someone is going to publish this as an established journalist, they would want to seek additional statements from the subject, the universities involved, and perhaps professional contacts. How was she able to teach law with such a limited background in law? For a larger and more relevant story, it would be useful to connect the information in a graphical interface to keep track of the relationships and be able to get back to the story weeks or months later, or even pass it on to somebody else.

For someone working in intelligence or law enforcement, there is going to be a detailed report to write with all the sources, and to back up the sources that are likely to be changed. Meaning to archive the websites through an independent third party. In this case I only used archive.org and my own copy but there are other services available for use by law enforcement to serve as proper evidence in court. Further analysis, inferences, and an assessment of the reliability of the data that was gathered is also needed. That is best done while collecting the data. I personally use a scale from 1-5 to assess the reliability for each bit of information but there are perhaps better ways of doing that.

Foreign intelligence services do these kind of detailed background checks all day long, for example on newly elected members of parliament, deputy governors, and emerging regional political leaders or others that may reach positions of influence in the future. They hope to find compromising information that can be leveraged for political clout, or simply to gain an understanding of someone’s preferences and way of thinking, so that they can be influenced more effectively.