How Indians Coordinate to Fake Their IT Certifications and Credentials

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How Indians Coordinate to Fake Their IT Certifications and Credentials

 

https://www.brightworkresearch.com/how-indians-coordinate-to-falsify-it-certifications/

 

By Shaun SnappJanuary 21, 2020

Executive Summary

• Indians have developed strategies for faking IT certifications.
• They frequently approach certificates as merely something to be shared with other Indians.

Introduction

Manufacturing certifications and degrees and cheating on exams, and buying university degrees is a common issue in India. This is a big part of how Indians claim to have more skills than the domestic IT workers in the countries to which Indians immigrate, like the US and Europe. Furthermore, once in these countries, they very commonly share certifications. This means that one person may take certification tests for multiple other people. This article will cover how a culture of cheating to obtain educational qualifications is considered entirely normal among Indians

 

 

Indians and IP

India is on the blacklist of 11 countries for stealing IP, as is explained in the following quotation.

In its “Special 301” annual report for 2018, the Office of the US Trade Representative Office (USTR) identifies “trading partners that do not adequately or effectively protect and enforce intellectual property (IP) rights or otherwise deny market access to US innovators and creators that rely on protection of their IP rights.”

The “black list” includes 11 countries: Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Venezuela, the Efe news reported. – NDTV

 

Edited March 12, 2021 by Bigbird

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Epic Versus Tata Consulting

The case of Epic v Tata is an example of this lack of concern for IP.

A federal jury’s decision to award $940 million in damages to electronic health records software vendor Epic Systems, which had sued an India-based consultancy alleging theft of trade secrets..Several years after Epic and TCS signed the agreement, the lawsuit alleged, “Epic … learned from an informant that TCS personnel [had] been fraudulently accessing Epic’s UserWeb computer network, and that the information obtained through the unauthorized access into UserWeb was being used to benefit TCS’s competing Med Mantra software.”(emphasis added)

The lawsuit also states: “After learning of the unauthorized and illegal downloading of Epic information by TCS personnel, and the apparent purpose of the misconduct, Epic evaluated its protected UserWeb and discovered that an account associated with a TCS employee who worked as a consultant for Kaiser in Portland, Oregon, and who worked on projects related to Epic’s provision of software and services to Kaiser, had downloaded from Epic’s UserWeb at least 6,477 documents accounting for 1,687 unique files.(emphasis added)

Epic also alleged in its suit that TCS leaders in the U.S. and India “appear to be aware of and complicit in TCS’s scheme to gain unauthorized access to Epic’s UserWeb and information and misuse them for the benefit of TCS.”

How Indians are Faking Skills

This is explained in the following quotation.

The foreign workers also have a million tricks for SEEMING to be more qualified than us. Many IT product producers have tried to tighten up certification standards so that idiots don’t get hired to work on their platforms and mess up. For those who are honest, they’ve set up rigorous training programs to make sure that workers know their stuff. Normally companies sponsor their workers to get this training and certification, but usually not for contractors, freelancers, the laid-off workers, and the lower-ranking workers. Those can still get the training, but it’s very expensive (like around $2K per class, sometimes more than one class needed)

But our thriftier foreign colleagues have found a way around this problem.

All over social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other more hidden venues, you can buy the exam vouchers on a hidden black market that you’re only supposed to be able to get after completing the certified training. I’m sure some vouchers are fake and won’t work, but the sheer size and prevalence of the market says many of them do work. I was told that there is no auditing of exam voucher blocks distributed to training companies and that in at least some cases a legit voucher would work more than once. It seems that siphoning off legitimate vouchers distributed to a training center for sale on the black market might be an inside job by foreign employees of the testing or training center.

For training, I was told..

Just take cheap classes on Udemy.”

But there’s other ways to get through the test without the training.

One is exam dumps. They may smuggle in a tiny camera, take hidden notes, use other stealth technologies, or just memorize as many of the questions as possible (and several of them pool their notes afterward). Many foreign education systems emphasize memorization skills over research and reasoning. There could possibly be collusion with a test proctor too. Then people study the dumps and get a (perhaps barely) passing score that way, without actually knowing much about the product. Yet another way is for one smart person to take the test for others, provided there is some physical similarity when the ID is checked if it is.

This applies to all the major career-enhancing platforms: SAP, Oracle, SalesForce, Workday, ServiceNow, you name it. So they can make it look like they have qualifications we couldn’t afford to get honestly. – Anonymous

What is an “Exam Dump”?

This provides the questions and the answers — therefore, there is no reason to go through the process of learning the subject matter. Curiously, sharing exam dumps is not known among the domestic US worker population, but is considered familiar places among Indian workers.

Skillcert, a Site that Promises Passing Certifications

One can purchase the exam key to various certifications right online. 

Notice this quotation off of the Skillcert website.

Unlike others, we update our questions every month with latest questions and tests.

That is right….the questions don’t get stale, because they are lifted continuously from the certification provider.

Exam dumps are available even on the Udemy website.

How Common are Credential Exam Dump Sites..and What is the Mindset Contained in This Behavior?

It turns out very common.

Before looking into this, this author had never even heard of the term. It is not a concept to take copies or save copies of credential exams and share them or sell them. A domestic worker’s experience with this issue is found in the following quotation.

I know they are sharing credentials and have been shown “dump” sites by Indian colleagues.

Sharing credentials between Indians is very common.  This also transcends to academic achievements.

What the west would consider anti-merit an Indian would consider that they have better-developed opportunity skills.

In addition, there is an attitude that it is inappropriate to pay for something that they are obviously already qualified to learn about later. It is much better and cheaper to have someone else pay for their time. Their selfish behavior is detrimental to the work environment as their lack of skill burdens those around them.

According to this source, it is not uncommon for one Indian to take the same exam under different identities seven times for seven different other Indians to get the entire group certified. There is no concept that each individual should have their own test administered. This allows Indians to accumulate credentials very quickly.

One Example

One vendor who is under heavy siege by Indian fraudsters is ServiceNow. ServiceNow issues exam vouchers in blocks with no audit of where they go and how they’re used. Third parties are used for both training and testing. A valid voucher code can be used more than once, so they get shared and sold. 

Cheating is happening for all of these vendors and more:

• SAP
• Salesforce
• Cisco
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Symantec
• Citrix
• Oracle
• Microsoft

All of these vendors should take extra precautions to increase the security around their certifications.

A Non Indian’s Experience with Fake Credentials

This quote came to us in August of 2020.

I once worked with an Indian guy and he told me that in India, they have these schools they call them programmer factories, where they train people to become computer programmers in 6 months or less. I spent 4 long (expensive) years in college to get my degree. These Indian(factory) schools are not concerned whether you get good grades or not, they are mostly concerned about whether they can place you and make money off you.

These schools are spread all over India and they target the US and European companies. This is what my Indian co-worker told me, right before he decided to go back to India to get married.

I experienced this level of corruption when I decided to try to upgrade my skills by attending a school that was  teaching .NET programming. I’m mainly a mainframe programmer, but I was between jobs at the time so I decided I would take advantage of the  Government’s FREE retraining program for people that were out of work during the 2008-2009 recession.

After I finished that 5 month program at this school, I was called by an Indian owned company based in Atlanta that promised to enroll you in an 8 week .NET training program then place you at some company located somewhere in the US.

The only catch was that they would INFLATE your Resume and say that you had 5-10 years experience,  when you actually had none. They had a guy “American” who called himself a “lawyer” who  would lie for you in case the company they were trying to place you with called for references. I worked for them for 6 months, but I was so scared the FBI would come and raid the place, plus I was constantly lying to my clients about my experience that I decided to quit. When I told them I was quitting, they tried to get me to pay for the 8 week training class which they said cost $20,000 ! I told them I would report them to the FBI so they left me alone.

This is reinforced by the following quote as well, which was provided in response to the quote above.

I ran into this same thing about 10 years ago: an Indian wanted to train me in SAP, but because he couldn’t make me stay with him, I’d have to pay him $1000. They’d “spice” my resume and place me.

Just last year or so, an Indian recruiter at an American company kept having me sign right to represent. After I signed the right to represent, but received no interviews, even for requirements with 2-4 seats. This is for jobs I could have done in my sleep.

It turns out he was simultaneously working with this outfit, right here in the US: http://www.micro2mega.com/ I can guess who he was sending into interviews instead of me.

This shows the company is not just doing training for existing staff: http://www.micro2mega.com/testmonials.html.

One giveaway is the upper range of experience – age discrimination.

Here is the MicoMega website. Indian recruiting/certification/placement firms have to have terrible websites for some reason. 

read more...

https://www.brightworkresearch.com/how-indians-coordinate-to-falsify-it-certifications/

 

 

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Gang of forgers sold 50,000 school and univ degrees, set up  ..
 

Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/62701357.cms?utm_sou

Gang of forgers sold 50,000 school and univ degrees, set up fake websites

 

This story is from January 30, 2018

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/gang-of-forgers-sold-50000-school-and-univ-degrees-set-up-fake-websites/articleshow/62701357.cms

 

Highlights

 

 

Highlights

• The gang even advertised its services besides running fake websites of over 30 education boards
• Police said several thousand people had got jobs in the government and private sectors on the basis of the forged certificates

 

Gang of forgers sold 50,000 school and un ..

 

Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/62701357.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst