The Weighted Airmen Promotion System — WAPS — is the standardized exam that helps determine which enlisted airmen get promoted. It’s supposed to be a level playing field. Between February 2000 and May 2004, Master Sergeant Abdur-Rahim Saafir, a mission-support flight superintendent stationed at Ramstein Air Base, helped run an operation to make sure it wasn’t.
The Scale of It
This wasn’t one person peeking at one answer key. Saafir’s ring memorized and traded answers across roughly 20 different versions of the exam, distributing the compromised material by phone and email to airmen stationed in Germany, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. A promotion exam that was supposed to measure individual competence became, for a meaningful stretch of four years, something you could just buy access to if you knew the right people.
A test built to measure individual merit became something you could buy access to, if you knew the right people.
The Court-Martial
Saafir pleaded guilty to conspiracy and failure-to-obey charges at a general court-martial. He was sentenced to a dishonorable discharge, reduction to E-1, and 42 months of confinement — among the heaviest sentences on this list, reflecting how seriously the Air Force treated a scheme that touched promotion outcomes across multiple continents.
What It Actually Cost
Every airman who studied honestly for WAPS during those four years was competing against people who’d simply bought the answers. Every one of Saafir’s co-conspirators who got promoted off a compromised test took a promotion slot that should have gone to someone who’d actually earned it. This is the rare entry on this list where the joke and the harm point in the same direction — it’s absurd that a global cheating ring for a written exam existed at all, and it’s genuinely serious that it worked for as long as it did.