“I am devastated”, Toronto lawyer Dennis Yang told CBC News after hiring fraudster with fake law degree who left him $100K in the hole. Yang said he was duped by Inayat Kassam’s phoney law degree and paid a price for hiring him.
TORONTO – Fake South Asian lawyer has left a real Toronto lawyer $100,000 in debt after he hired the man who possessed a fake law degree.
“I am devastated”, Toronto lawyer Dennis Yang told CBC News after hiring fraudster with fake law degree who left him $100K in the hole. Yang said he was duped by Inayat Kassam’s phoney law degree and paid a price for hiring him.
Kassam, 34, has been described as a smooth-talking fraudster with a law degree that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Kassam, who hails from Aurora, Ont., purchased his phoney law degree online five years ago from the University of Renfrew. The school has no officially recognized accreditation and its website features a fake address in Tampa, Fla., and stock images of supposed faculty members, reported CBC News.
He previously purchased a bachelor of arts from Ashwood University, another fake school that claims to be based in Florida.
The official-looking degrees were enough to impress Dennis Yang, who was introduced to Kassam in 2014 through a trusted colleague and hired him to manage new business for his Toronto law office.
“He told me he had a law degree from another jurisdiction,” Yang says. “And was currently working on getting licensed in Canada.”
Yang asked Kassam to send him transcripts, reference letters and his university diplomas, which appeared to be legitimate.
“The quality that you get from those diploma mills, it was just outstanding,” Yang says. “I would have thought if it was fake, it wouldn’t be so nice in terms of how they’ve presented all the documents.”
Yang says he wanted to expand, so he hired Kassam to manage a new office. He says Kassam mostly worked alone and quickly set about preying on new and often vulnerable immigrants.
“He would try to squeeze as much money out of them as possible on the promise he would be able to bring their families to Canada,” Yang says. “They really, really trusted him. They did not suspect a thing.”
He says some clients maxed out their credit cards to pay Kassam, while others took out second mortgages or lines of credit.
“I think that’s just heartbreaking for them and their families, because now we’re talking about people in developing countries who are now stuck there, when they could have had a chance to come to Canada.”
Kassam was convicted earlier this year of two counts of fraud and one count of uttering forged documents and sentenced to three years in prison — ironically, the approximate length of time it would take to graduate from an actual law school in Canada.
