Ever been awe-struck by stellar profiles on LinkedIn with claims of graduating from prestigious universities, 10+ years of experience at top tech companies and 500+ connections? What if I told you that some of them could be completely fake, carefully designed to fool you? Such is the case of about 1000 profiles, professing to have graduated from China’s top university, created for pig-butchering scams.  Every year, millions of fake profiles are created to fool the unassuming public, especially to get them hooked on to fraudulent schemes, courses or crypto rings. Though LinkedIn and other social media platforms are actively working to detect these malpractices, the leeway of not having a verifying authority gives any user the freedom to fake their profiles. And once they’ve built…

A 34-year-old man, who runs a roadside shop in Ashok Nagar (Chennai), has been arrested for posing as an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras professor, and marrying a doctor two years ago for dowry (source: The New Indian Express). In recent times, despite the growth in social media and technology, it’s become harder to verify the background details of a person without a common verification source we can readily check.    When a person can fake social media profiles, photos, and documents and even get people to lie for them, can you truly verify someone’s job credentials without physically checking their job location? How can people or organizations hope to verify someone without spending an exorbitant amount of money on background checks?  These are…

Every one of us is seeking stability in these difficult times with iffy health security. When all other choices have failed, we turn to hospitals for help. Yet, even the most premium institutions continue to let us down. In the past month, West Bengal’s capital city Kolkata has caught six fraudulent doctors. A seventh individual was taken into custody for providing bogus MBBS certificates. Over 560 fraudulent medical certifications were sold for thousands of rupees.  Growing technology has aided fraudulence by enabling widespread public access to a variety of useful tools like photoshop. Deception is rampant, ranging from identity theft to fake degrees. If there had been a means to examine the doctors’ backgrounds, those with major health issues would have been spared. This brings…