When screening the background of a potential employee, many organizations will conduct their education verifications themselves rather than leaving that responsibility to their background screening provider.
While cost-saving, this could be problematic. Accepting a diploma at face value could potentially be detrimental to hiring procedures. Sadly, in my experience in the background investigation industry, I’ve seen a lot of fake diplomas.
It’s always best to go to the primary source for verification instead of just accepting a document that could potentially be fabricated.
“How could a diploma be fake?” you may be asking yourself, but there are a lot of companies out there that market “novelty” or “replica” diplomas for people who either want to use them as gag gifts or to display instead of their actual document.
What’s especially concerning is there are people out there who will purchase these diplomas and try to pass them off as actual academic achievement when searching for a job.
Don’t believe me? Google “buy a fake diploma,” pick any of the numerous websites listed, and read their reviews. It’s alarming how many people try to pass off these documents as authentic.
In my own experience, I would claim to have seen it all, but I’m consistently shocked. Just in the past week, I found two instances of fabricated diplomas. The first was a General Equivalency Diploma (GED).
There are ways to verify a GED with primary source verification. For this particular individual, we initially tried a database that searches by social security number and date of birth. There were no results, not even a failure notice.
The individual had “received” the GED somewhat recently, so there was no reason for the results to not be in the database.
When provided a copy of the GED, quite a few things struck me as odd. New York State GED’s are extremely homogenous, and this one did not follow the pattern.
For example, there was a full date of graduation. New York State GED’s only include month and year. The watermark was too wide, and then there were the signatories.
The commissioner of education displayed on the document was never actually a commissioner of education, and especially not one for the year of the document.
In fact, you can easily look up who has served as the NYS commissioner of education and the dates they served that position. Turns out, it was in fact purchased from one of the numerous sites referenced above.