Lorenz University

Complaints & Reviews on USAComplaints

USAComplaints currently maintains 1 historical complaint about Lorenz University, published in 2011. No approved complaints have been published on this site during the last three years.

• You pay to get nothingPublished May 7, 2011 · Historical consumer allegation

Complaint Themes

Each tag reflects a complaint's single primary theme (not every angle it raised), and complaints outside any problem theme — a positive report, or one later retracted by its author — aren't tagged. Counts may total less than the full complaint count above.

What is Lorenz University?

Lorenz University was an online "university" that sold bachelor's, master's, doctorate, and high-school-equivalent credentials based, according to its own historical promotional material, on either four years of relevant work/life experience or a passing score on an online equivalency test -- not on coursework. Its own promotional material advertised delivery of a diploma within 15 days of payment and claimed "42,000 students have graduated from Lorenz so far."

That same promotional material claimed accreditation from the "International Accreditation Association for Online Education (IAAFOE)" and the "Accreditation Council for Distance Education (ACTDE)." Neither is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). GetEducated.com's Diploma Mill Police lists Lorenz University as having no legitimate accreditation and identifies IAAFOE and ACTDE as accrediting-sounding names that are not real, recognized accreditors.

As of this review, the operation's domain, lorenzuniversity.com, is not an active school site — it resolves to a HugeDomains "domain for sale" listing priced at $3,895. The promotional and complaint material we located dates mainly to 2009-2011; no current (2020s) phone number, email, or physical address for this entity could be located. That said, later professional and government sources continue to identify Lorenz in diploma-mill/fake-school records -- see the Legitimacy section below.

Is Lorenz University Legitimate?

Lorenz University is not accredited by any body recognized in the United States. Its degrees were issued for a flat fee based on a short test or self-reported experience rather than coursework, and its claimed accrediting bodies (IAAFOE, ACTDE) do not appear as recognized accreditors anywhere outside material tied to this same network of sites -- a pattern GetEducated.com's Diploma Mill Police classifies as a degree mill.

South Africa's Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) currently lists Lorenz University in its official register of bogus/unregistered institutions (Annexure A, updated 8 May 2026). The entry describes an operation run from an apartment in Karachi, Pakistan by a person identified as Salem Kureshi, using multiple "credible" names including Ashwood University, Belford University, Corllins University, Headway University, Hill University, Lorenz University, McFord University, Panworld University, Rochville University, Western Advanced Central University, Wilson State University, and Woodfield University -- with websites possibly based in Pakistan and/or the USA and certificates posted from the United Arab Emirates. The register states any diploma or degree can be bought online at a discounted price within days, and that payment is never recoverable. Separately, a 2020 AACRAO (the U.S. professional association of college registrars) publication on diploma mills associates lorenzuniversity.com with Axact, a Pakistani company separately documented (including by a 2015 New York Times investigation) as operating a large network of fake online universities; AACRAO and DHET do not give an identical operator attribution, so both are reported here rather than treated as confirming the same story.

A complaint submitted to USAComplaints.com in 2011 names "Lorenz university" as the offender and describes paying roughly $1,200 toward "legalization costs" and then being ignored -- this complaint does not itself raise an accreditation issue. Separately, a 2010 complaint filed on this site names a wider list of similarly structured sites as promoted from a common hub site (onlineeducationalfacts.com) and sharing the same absence of a real company address or phone number; that complaint's allegation that these sites share a common operator is attributed to the complainant, not independently confirmed here. We removed "Ashford University" from that reported list: Ashford University was a real, separately WSCUC-accredited institution (accredited 2013, reaffirmed 2019) later acquired by the University of Arizona in 2020 to become University of Arizona Global Campus, and it does not appear in DHET's current list of names used in this operation -- grouping it with Lorenz risked a false association. Third-party commentary (a dedicated "Lorenz University Exposed" blog and a DegreeInfo.com forum discussion) separately alleges non-response to degree-verification requests, though those specific pages could not be directly re-fetched this session and are noted as such.

This is not the same institution as Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz (also called "Konrad Lorenz University"), a Ministry of Education-recognized nonprofit university in Bogotá, Colombia, whose psychology program holds international accreditation from the Association for Behavior Analysis International. The names are similar but the two are unrelated entities and should not be confused.

If you paid Lorenz University

A degree from this operation is very unlikely to be accepted by an employer, licensing board, or accredited college, since it is unaccredited and its claimed accrediting bodies are not recognized. Do not present it as an accredited credential.

No current working contact channel for the company was found. If you're still within your card issuer's dispute window, a chargeback citing non-delivery of the paid-for service is generally the most realistic path to recovering funds.

If you're evaluating a program with a similar name today, verify accreditation directly against the U.S. Department of Education's accreditation database or CHEA's list of recognized accreditors — not against claims made on the school's own site.

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