The Weakest Link

If you didn’t catch this week’s Panorama exposé on application fraud click here to see how faked qualifications are enabling bogus students to enrol on degree courses, paid for by taxpayer-funded student loans.

The undercover BBC investigation showed fake references and certificates being used to gain places on degree level courses at a number of universities and colleges. Having gained the places, the students then had access to student loans worth thousands of pounds. The rogue intermediaries and agents took their cut of the loans. But this is just the start of it.

The undercover students were then offered additional services to provide their assignments by using essay mills and cover their attendance requirements while they were at work. Now we’re talking about academic fraud.

With their bought-in assignments and fake certificates the students were able to get a genuine degree or diploma, albeit fraudulently obtained*.

Fraudulently obtained degrees could then be used to enter postgraduate study or the workplace putting the reputations of businesses and universities at risk from unqualified candidates. This also jeopardises the prospects for genuine students and graduates seeking jobs or further study if they lose out to fraudsters.

We must cut this off at the pass and stop bogus students enrolling in the first place and exploiting the system.

Unscrupulous agents will look for weak points in the system and colleges without clearly defined policies will be ripe for exploitation. Colleges and universities need to have robust and clearly visible fraud guidelines as part of their admissions policies and they must be prepared to take action against what is criminal activity.

Download our free Toolkit with advice and guidance on preventing fraud. In the meantime here are our top tips.

• Have a published policy on application fraud for your college or university
• Tell applicants you always check qualifications. This can be a deterrent.
• Don’t take certificates at face value. Verify the claims directly with the awarding body and trust the data, not the paper.
• Take action against fraud – zero tolerance.

 

*Known as FOG documents. Fraudulently Obtained Genuine documents

Imperfect Ten

Our friends at Risk Advisory have just published their annual report on CV Lies for 2017 analysing 5000 CVs from job applicants as part of their professional screening services. Please take a moment to go over to their website and read it.

Last year their report showed that lying on CVs was up 7% on the previous year at 70%.

This year’s figures are up 10% overall on last year which shows that despite our best efforts and high profile cases of fraud from people lying about qualifications, people are still prepared to cheat their way into work. Making proper background checks on your potential employees is vital.

Here are the headlines:

• 80% of CVs contain discrepancies*
• 57% of those discrepancies are about academic background
• 12% of candidates falsify their grades

*Personally I think discrepancies is a little polite. Let’s call them lies.

Risk Advisory have kindly broken that down for us to look specifically at HE qualifications.

• 44% of the academic background discrepancies were at degree level or above
• 7% of candidates falsify their grades at degree level and above

To put it in real terms – if you receive 200 CV applications for a job 40 of them will have lies about degree qualifications. 14 of them will have false grades.

The need to make checks has never been greater. 3 simple steps in your recruitment practices can make all the difference:

1. Tell candidates you will check all qualifications.
2. Ask to see certificates – don’t rely on CVs or application forms.
3. Check the certificates with the awarding institutions – beware fakes.

Thankfully more employers are sitting up and taking notice. Checks on Hedd are up 10% on last year so our messages are getting through. You can download our free toolkit for employers here.

 

Angels of the North

Last year we named and shamed Robert Gordon International University which was quickly shut down and last week Newcastle International University was red flagged by the real Newcastle University as a bogus university.

The website uses real photographs of Newcastle University including one showing students wearing their Newcastle University IDs, but was entirely fabricated.

The university raised the alarm and took action when an applicant tweeted a question about the institution.

The website asks potential students to hand over credit card details on the website to pay for courses. No genuine UK university would do this and students need to question it if they are asked for payments online for courses.

Many universities have international offices and overseas campuses and increasingly offer opportunities for distance learning. This kind of copy-cat website exploits the fact that international students may not be as familiar with UK universities as domestic applicants. They steal text and images from the real institution websites in an effort to extort monies. This is completely illegal and the websites can be shut down if the alarm is raised. Contact the degree fraud team at Hedd if you have any concerns or wish to report a website.

Our top tips for students to spot bogus universities:

If it’s not featured on the official Government list of degree awarding bodies it is not a valid UK university.

If it doesn’t have a .ac.uk web address it is not a valid UK university.

If it asks you to submit credit card or passport details on the website it is not a valid UK university.

If it uses American phrases; prices in US Dollars; poor grammar or spelling it is not a valid UK university

If the contact details don’t look right e.g. premium phone numbers, PO Box mailing addresses or personal email addresses like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo it is not a valid UK university.

If Google Street View for the campus shows you an empty shop front, industrial park or two-bedroomed semi-detached house in Suburbia it is not a valid UK university.

The Price of Cheap Beer

Mohammed Dar claims he was offering fake university IDs for students to help them get into student union bars to buy cheap beer.

Searching his home in Stretford Manchester, police recovered:

• 152 completed forgeries of Manchester Metropolitan University ID cards
• 42 fake Brunel University cards
• 7 fake University of Manchester cards
• 6 fake University of Liverpool cards
• 4 fake University of Leeds cards.

It reads like a present list on the 12 Days of Fraudmass, but in sentencing Dar to prison the judge nailed it with his comments:

‘You can open a false bank account with a photo ID and an electricity bill….This country and its institutions operate on the basis of trust – trust in documents. Organisations don’t have the time or the resources to go and check whether every document is genuine.’

Fun fact: Prospects verification service Hedd allows enquirers to verify current university students as well as certificates and transcripts from graduates. As an employer if an applicant uses student ID to prove their identity you can quickly establish the truth online at www.hedd.ac.uk. Already covering over 80% of graduates from UK institutions and expanding all the time Hedd is the UK’s official HE verification service with over 100 universities available on the system.

A few months ago we received an enquiry from colleagues in Denmark who had concerns about a UK student applying to work for them. Here’s the ID she provided to them:

Her fake passport wasn’t much better quality, but the employer still needed to be sure.

As well as the student ID cards, Dar was using a specialist printer and editor to sell hundreds of items for as little as £20. His phone was full of evidence of customers buying a variety of documents.

Check job or course applicants every time or it could cost your business a lot more than the price of a cheap pint.

Jon the Builder

‘Dr’ Jon Andrewes – the ‘Walter Mitty’ character we flagged a couple of weeks ago has now been sentenced and will spend the next two years in prison.

The full extent of the lies about his qualifications has come to light and is staggering in its impudence. As Mad Dog says in The Cannonball Run – ‘If you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly!’

• First Class degree from Bristol
• Masters degree from Bristol
• MBA from Edinburgh
• PhD from Heriot-Watt
• PhD from Plymouth

All completely untrue.

He lied about working for the Home Office and HMRC and being a partner in a technology firm, when in fact he started out as a builder.

Using his embellished CV he obtained a senior position in the NHS in 2004 and went on to earn over £1million in a 10 year period in other senior NHS roles before his bosses finally questioned him in 2016.

In court he also admitted to tinkering with his daughter’s degree certificate from the University of London.

It’s never too late to check the people working for you. HEDD’s Toolkit for Employers can be downloaded here.

 

 

Want anything from the shop?

We already advise graduates not to post pictures of their degree certificates online – the ‘Twitter Selfie’ as we like to call it. Not only does this reveal personal information about an individual it also gives fraudsters perfect templates to create, sell and/or use fake degree certificates.

A suspicious certificate was reported to the HEDD fraud team this week by our verification team as the dates on the certificate did not match the years the course was run.

A Google image search revealed a potential source of the fake certificate to be the university’s own online shop.  The institution in question offers an online service to its graduates to purchase replacement certificates, transcripts and letters of verification and has sample images of the documents on its website.

The assumption is that the image will only be seen by students visiting the page.

The truth is that it joins the infinite internet universe of searchable images to be copied, saved and used by anyone with access to an online device.

We have contacted colleagues at the university to advise them to remove the images and we’re urging other universities to do the same.

A Little Help from Our Friends

We are delighted to report more success shutting down bogus providers and grateful for the vigilance of our partners in Naric and in universities in spotting these pretenders and notifying us. Both perpetrators were using Ascension Islands .ac domains to mimic our real UK academic .ac.uk domains.

Hashford London University, using pictures of the glorious Coombe Abbey and gardens in Warwickshire as its campus, was reported by one of our UK universities for using text from their website. On closer inspection the website contained references to a number of UK universities despite having no connections with them. They also claimed an association with the Higher Education Academy who have confirmed to us that no such link exists.  The owners are based in Malaysia  and out of reach of UK law. They appear to have links with other defunct learning institutions.

Ridgeshire University of London claimed to be a private elearning institution but listed campus locations in the UK and had addresses and phone numbers for the Faroe islands and Aberdeen. Colleagues in Sweden reported this to us when one of its degree certificates came to them for verification. The certificate gives details of how to verify its authenticity on the university website, which worked when we tested it – another example of a website existing to back up paper credentials.

By the way, the name on the certificate was Happy – I suspect that’s not how the individual feels now they’ve been found out.

The websites are offline and the  details have been added to the bogus provider database on hedd.ac.uk

8 providers were reported to us in January for investigation so please check back here for progress.

Facepalm

Comments on this blog are most welcome and means someone is reading and engaging with our messages. Thank you commenters all.

Today’s commenter deserves a special prize.

Let’s see who our new number one fan is…..

Are they filled with remorse? Turning themselves in?

No.

The folks over at Custom Diploma think this is a site endorsing fake diplomas and want us to advertise their wares!*

Thanks to WordPress we have their IP address and email clearly displayed, so our fraud team will be reporting them immediately.

We just couldn’t resist sharing. Happy Tuesday everyone.

*Other fake certificate websites are available**

**But not for long.

A Question of Trust

It’s good to see the NHS taking a strong position on application fraud right up to senior levels and prosecuting offenders.

This month sees two men who lied about their qualifications – including possessing fake degree certificates to obtain senior positions in the NHS, back in court.

Conrad de Souza had already been imprisoned for 27 months in 2011 for faking medical qualifications in order to hold clinical guidance roles and was also ordered to repay the NHS £270,000. After his release he repeatedly lied about his qualifications on applications for a number of senior positions in the NHS and was convicted of 6 counts of fraud in December. This week he has been sent back to prison for 17 months.

Dr. Jon Andrewes is a former NHS trust chairman who lied spectacularly about his qualifications to get two top NHS jobs as chairman of the Torbay NHS Care Trust and later the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust. According to his online biography he is Dr. Jon Andrewes with a PhD from Heriot-Watt University where he specialised in researching leadership, management and success attributes in the commercial sector. His first degree is in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and he also has an MBA with a finance specialism from the University of Bristol. All these claims are false. He pleaded guilty at Exeter Crown Court recently and will be sentenced on the 1st March. At the time of recruiting him into these senior roles the NHS checked his references, but not his degrees.

The advice here is simple. Check qualifications for everyone you hire – regardless of seniority, fine CVs and track records. Fraudsters come in all guises.

Seven!

September was a record month for our degree fraud team shutting down no less than seven bogus websites.

This takes us to over 40 shutdowns since the project for the Government started last summer.

Four were bogus universities all claiming to offer UK degrees:

• Stafford University*
• Ashcroft University
• John Hever Academy
• Atlantic Pacific Mission University

Three were websites selling fake degree certificates from multiple UK universities.

Coordination with law enforcement agencies means we can suspend the websites and get the owner details to Trading Standards (if they are UK-based) in a timely fashion.

We get websites reported from multiple sources now so word is getting out. If you have any concerns over whether an institution is a genuine UK degree awarding body you can check quickly and easily on the free university look-up service here on the HEDD website. If the university isn’t listed there, call our fraudline on 0845 077 1968 or contact us online here.

*(not to be confused with the entirely genuine Staffordshire University)