It’s bad enough if you have a vicar to officiate at a funeral or a wedding whose ordination certificate is fake; or are treated by a nurse or doctor or dentist who has forged their qualifications. The speaker at a London Fraud Forum webinar last week, introduced by the LFF chairman Rob Brooker, pointed out that the harm done by such a fraudster need not stop there.
The speaker was Adam Crosbie, qualification fraud policy officer for Prospects Hedd. That’s part of Jisc, which provides digital services to UK academia. Prospects Hedd provides a checking service for qualifications; and seeks to identify and shut bogus institutions and perpetrators of degree fraud in the UK. Adam ended his talk by giving several UK and world cases from the public domain of people who had lied their way into a responsible job by forging or inventing qualifications, and then – having found that they got away with it – went on to do more harm, whether making bogus expenses claims or making further bogus claims (including fake job offers from other employers) to get yet more pay and responsibility.
Among the UK cases was the unqualified court interpreter who took on the identity of another interpreter, to gain more work, and who paid someone else (also not qualified to be a court interpreter) to do work in court. After the fraudster was sentenced in February, City of London Police said that the fraudster ‘has undermined confidence in the criminal justice system’.
Adam Crosbie’s advice? In brief, ‘it always pays to verify’. It’s also suggested:
– Just by saying that you will verify CVs, an employer can discourage fraudsters from applying;
– have whistle-blowing in place; the fellow workers of a fraudster may suspect that their colleague is fake; if workers cannot report their suspicions, that can be bad for staff morale;
– and whatever the job, vicar, fork lift truck driver, doctor, you cannot assume that the paperwork and the CV or any piece of paper giving a qualification is true.
Adam showed examples of bogus qualification documents to make the point that they can be hard to tell apart from the real thing, in terms of style and content, given that an employer would have to know what the genuine institution’s degree or other document looks like.
For more from Adam Crosbie, see his recent blog on the JISC website. More in the August 2021 print edition of Professional Security magazine.
For more about the LFF webinars, visit the LFF website.
