There are many websites which are openly advertising and doing business of providing fake degree and diploma online.
After leaders like Jitender Singh Tomar of AAP, Smiriti Irani and Vinod Tawde of BJP caught controversy, it seems that ‘fake’ degrees are easily available. For a few hundred dollars, you can buy a degree of any college in the world. “Through this degree, you can apply for a job in any MNC in India or abroad. Get a diploma, degree or a certificate from any major university today. Professional degrees from top engineering, law, MCA, MBA or design institutes are also available.” There are many websites mushrooming and claiming the above statement on the net. Websites like https://www.phonydiploma.com/Fake-Diploma-From-India-University.aspx or https://www.diplomacompany.in/ will provide you choice of degrees as per your need, what you have to do is just transfer some money to the given bank account number and scan your certificate to them, they will shipped you the degree in ten working days. You cannot differentiate an original degree from a fake one. Checks need to be put in place to curtail the crime.
Apart from above mentioned sites, there are thousands of advertisements unashamedly promoting forged degrees in India. The country has received a notorious label for having the highest number of cases of employment-related discrepancy, according to a recent background discrepancy survey done globally by background screening firm ‘First Advantage’. “The survey was carried out globally, and the data had been collected from the employment logs of various industries. An alarming rate of 50 per cent of all the job aspirants forging their previous job experience certificates were exposed during the survey. In fact, the statistics of 2013 indicated cases with such irregularities in some employment sectors to have been as high as 71.5 per cent and now it has gone up.”
“Employers and institutions have the option of using manual checking systems, which typically entails a verification agency to do physical checks at various locations to ensure that correct data is being submitted by job-seekers. This is an expensive, lengthy and a cumbersome process, which may take weeks or even months to complete, but it won’t guarantee foolproof check,” said an educationist from Mumbai University.
First, the forgers collect the information of the university about the type of stationery papers and ink they use, and identical holograms etc which makes it extremely difficult to spot a fake degree. Secondly, the broken system allows some of the fake degrees to be issued with the help of university officials for the price of a few hundred rupees. They even put it in the records, which make background checks extremely hard for a corporate or any institution. The reputation of universities and institutes under whose name the fake degrees are issued also gets affected through this. There are certain options that can help curtail this problem.
Gaurav Singh, a cyber security expert said AV, “To authenticate such certificates, Global Software Company has recently launched a simple, yet highly secure solution to hasten and foolproof the verification process. This can be implemented by educational institutions while issuing degrees and certificates and can be instantly verified at the user end by a simple and free downloadable app on a smart phone. It can be implemented within no time and is “counterfeit-proof.” It can help deserving candidates get the right jobs, besides enabling employers save millions in carrying out background checks and verification process of the candidates.”
Cyber Security personnel Ajit Hatti has put some more light on the issue and provided a solution and said, “There should be online databases of degree holders. Any authorized person trying to verify a person’s degree should be able to go to a specific database and see the degree and a transcript of the personal’s grades or marks. There should be a chain of command of linked web-based databases, which can be accessed by authorized persons to make sure that the university, the department, and the discipline exists and that the person received a degree in a particular year.”
