Verification Chronicles: The Careless Copycat

Somewhere, somebody has finished a degree and posted a photograph of the certificate on LinkedIn. The gown, the grin, the paper held up to the camera. Every summer, LinkedIn fills with the same photograph.

That photograph is also a security document, taken in good light, and published where anyone can find it.

A case we handled at Verifile began with a photograph like that one.

A candidate had applied for a job at a multinational bank, and the bank asked us to verify his degree.

We'll call him Adam*.

The lesser award

Adam declared a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Reading, awarded about eighteen months earlier. Last October our client asked us to verify the degree.

What Adam achieved through the University of Reading was not a bachelor's degree. It was a Certificate of Higher Education in Business, or in the university's own words, "a lesser award".

The Department for Education puts a Certificate of Higher Education at the same level as the first year of a bachelor's degree. A bachelor's degree with honours is two levels higher and takes three years. Adam had about one year of study, and he had claimed three.

There was even more in the university's record. Adam had begun a pharmacy degree at Reading a few years earlier and left it without finishing, then started again with the finance course in mind.

He had been a student at Reading. He had claimed a bachelor's degree he did not have.

The certificate

Most checks would stop there. We had the answer our client had asked for, and the discrepancy was plain.

Nevertheless, we went further because a discrepancy that size can also be somebody's mistake, and a mistake left uncorrected would cost Adam his career. We asked Adam for a copy of his bachelor's degree certificate, so the document itself could go in front of the university.

He sent the certificate the next day.

Almost nobody really looks closely at a degree certificate. You look at it, the crest is in the right place, the name matches the CV, and you move on to the next thing in the pile. This certificate would have passed that look. It gave Adam a 2:1, and nothing about it invited a second glance.

We sent the certificate to the University of Reading and asked whether the certificate was theirs. The answer came back within the week.

"I can verify that the information we have already given is correct... The University cannot verify the attached document as official.

The University considers that the document may be forged and is therefore undertaking further investigations. The student number on the certificate does not match this student's name.

We will then undertake further investigations and submit these to the Head of Governance and the University Secretary for a review."

One line in there did the work. The student number on the certificate does not match this student's name. The student in question was Adam.

This certificate carried Adam's name above somebody else's student number. And Adam had a student number of his own, because he really had studied at Reading.

The number that belonged to somebody else

Curiosity got the better of our team. One of them went looking through other Reading certificates, to see where that student number might have come from. Hundreds of images came back, which is what happens when you search for a document that thousands of people are proud of. Among them was a LinkedIn post from a real graduate, holding up their certificate, exactly the photograph anybody would take.

The student number on that graduate's certificate was also the student number on Adam's.

What our team felt was shock, and then a kind of amusement at the lengths Adam had gone to.

Now the typography made sense. The course name and the date both sit in the wrong typeface, and those are two of the three things Adam had to change. The third was the name. The student number did not have to be changed at all, so Adam left the student number where it was, and the student number was the one thing on the page that led back to a real person.

We do not know how many employers had taken this certificate at face value before us. Or background screening providers.

What we could not finish

The University of Reading's last word referred the matter to its Head of Governance and University Secretary, and the university never told us what they decided. Nobody put the graduate's LinkedIn post to Adam, and we never learned what our client did next.

What settled this case was not a close reading of the document. It was asking the University of Reading, because the university was the only party that could confirm the award. And it was going back a second time when the first answer did not add up, because accuracy has to work in both directions. The same second look that caught Adam is what would have cleared him, had the university been the one who got it wrong.

The certificate that made all of this possible had been sitting in public the whole time, in good light, at a resolution somebody else could work from.

Names and certain details have been changed for confidentiality.