A massive scam in Multan led to the suspension of eight law colleges over claims of financial malpractice and organised fraud amounting to Rs 459 million. The issue was first investigated when it was discovered that 14,000 students had been illegally admitted into a fraudulent LLB program that drew its legitimacy from fake documents; unapproved by an official board. The exact scale of the crime has not yet been determined, but it is clear that this has been going on for a while. Many of these colleges didn’t have the authority to admit students into their program at all, and instituted no real mechanisms to verify the credibility of registration fees and overall university income, indicating a serious lack of communication between the registrar and treasurer offices at these universities. Students complained that some of these colleges hadn’t held official examinations in 2017, a major red flag that should’ve sent alarm bells ringing everywhere, but no one cared enough to notice despite a near-constant stream of complaints from unhappy students. So, why wasn’t this investigated sooner? Especially, when the Supreme Court had already issued an official ruling for the suspension of these colleges in 2018, an order that the Bahauddin Zakariya University categorically failed to implement. What’s more concerning is that there was absolutely no legal oversight in the five years following the Supreme Court order, either from law enforcement or from within the organisation itself. It is precisely this lack of transparency that enables predatory organisations to exploit vulnerable people who do not have the resources to fight an entire institution and its complex web of deceit all by themselves. Thousands of students have lost crucial years chasing a dream that was doomed, to begin with-even if the colleges in question end up giving them their money back, the time and energy they invested is likely lost forever. It is also a huge disservice to the parents who spent large chunks of money that they can barely afford in the hopes that their kids can graduate and make a better life for themselves one day-those responsible for this scam were obviously acutely aware of this when they engineered this enterprise. *