Before hiring someone or choosing a course at a university or any educational institution, do your research. If you are a recruiter, it is important to check if the institution mentioned in the diploma you want to check exists, if they offer the course for which the certificate was given, and if local authorities adequately accredit the institution.

The institution’s official website can offer a lot of information, including the length of courses, type of certificate, and level of education. When confronted with a diploma that might not be real, compare it to what the institution claims and check if the information provided by the certificate holder matches what the institution offers.

It is a good idea also to check your local accreditation agency. The Higher Education Degree Data check (Hedd) in the United Kingdom is an important tool for checking credentials. For non-degree qualifications, there are other accrediting bodies in the UK: the Ofqual in England, Qualifications Wales, the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations & Assessment in Northern Ireland, and the Scottish Qualifications Authority in Scotland. 

Only some institutions offer Distance Learning courses. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more people have taken online classes and looked for alternatives to in-person lessons. As a result, faking online courses has also increased.

Since distance learning is only sometimes available, only some courses are accredited. It is crucial to check if the certification listed on suspicious diplomas is accredited – especially when it’s an online course.

Pay extra attention if the course requires some practical experience, which would be challenging to achieve long-distance or during the pandemic. 

Each certification requires a specific amount of hours or credits for students to graduate. When falsifying documents, not everyone will pay attention to these details. Check how many semesters are listed on the diploma and how many credits the candidate claims to have taken. Comparing the certificate with course requirements available online will give you an excellent way to identify scams. 

The mistakes lie in detail with printed or even digital copies of fake diplomas. You might find misspelt words, incorrect seals or stamps, and weird signatures. While examining a printed diploma, make sure the document is signed by pen, not digitally. The same goes for seals and stamps, which should be done physically, not digitally – unless they provide a reference number or QR code to check the document’s authenticity.

You should carefully examine the spelling of the institution’s names. Often, trying to pass a fake diploma or deceive a recruiter, people will make up an institution name similar to but not exactly the same as renowned universities. Ensure everything is spelt correctly, and check the full names of accredited places. 

It’s not always that you will come across the perfect resume. It is worth investigating if something seems too perfect, precisely what you are looking for and more. You should check references and school history to ensure the candidate is what they claim to be. 

The same can be said for students trying to avoid a “diploma mill”: an institution that will provide an essentially worthless piece of paper. If a school offers a lot for a small price, assess carefully. Check if the institution is accredited, if they will provide a verifiable certificate and if your qualifications will be valid once you graduate.

More common than most organisations want to acknowledge. According to Entrust’s 2025 Identity Fraud Report, digital document forgery surpassed physical counterfeits for the first time in 2024, with digital forgeries accounting for 57% of all document fraud globally – a 244% increase from 2023 and a 1,600% surge since 2021. The global academic fraud industry, including diploma mills and cheating services, is estimated to be worth around $21 billion annually.

How many people misrepresent their credentials when applying for jobs? The answer depends heavily on how the question is asked and who is asking it. Studies consistently show the problem is significant, but estimates vary widely. An Equifax study of 254 HR professionals found that 71% had encountered fake or misleading candidate details during the hiring process. HireRight’s background screening research found that 85% of employers had uncovered a lie or misrepresentation on a candidate’s resume – up from 66% five years prior. A study by ResumeDoctor reviewing over 1,100 resumes found that 43% contained one or more significant inaccuracies, including misrepresentations of education. The range of figures reflects different methodologies, industries, and definitions of misrepresentation – but the direction is consistent: credential fraud in hiring is widespread, growing, and significantly underdetected.

There are estimated to be more than 3,300 unaccredited institutions worldwide actively distributing fake qualifications. Documented cases span healthcare, engineering, aviation, and corporate leadership – credential fraud is not a fringe problem. It is systemic.

Yes. In fields where qualifications exist to protect people, a fake credential can be lethal.

Engineering: A building collapse that killed 115 people was attributed to a construction project supervised by an individual who had stolen the identity of a professional engineer and faked an engineering degree. In New Zealand, a skyscraper that collapsed during an earthquake killed 155 people – an investigation later found that the building had been constructed with the involvement of someone holding a fraudulent engineering qualification.

Aviation: In 2020, an investigation following a Pakistan International Airlines crash that killed 97 people in Karachi revealed that 262 of 860 Pakistani pilots held fraudulent or questionable licences – in many cases having paid others to sit their exams on their behalf. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) described the situation as a “grave safety concern” and banned PIA from flying to Europe. The UK, the US, and aviation authorities across the Middle East and Asia grounded Pakistani pilots while their credentials were reviewed. The ban lasted nearly five years, with PIA only resuming flights to Europe in January 2025. The financial cost to the airline exceeded an estimated Rs200 billion.

Healthcare: Operation Nightingale, a US federal investigation, uncovered a scheme in which over 7,600 fake nursing diplomas and transcripts were sold between 2016 and 2021 for more than $114 million. Thousands of unqualified individuals used these credentials to pass national licensing exams and enter the nursing workforce – treating real patients with no legitimate training. Investigations are still ongoing across 13 states.

In the UK, Zholia Alemi forged her medical qualifications to work as a hospital psychiatrist within the NHS for over 22 years, fraudulently obtaining more than £1 million. She was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of 20 offences including fraud and forgery, and was subsequently ordered to repay £406,624 to the NHS. The judge called for a public inquiry into how the General Medical Council had registered her as a doctor based on documents that were “clearly false.”

These are not edge cases. They are documented, prosecuted examples of what happens when credential verification fails.

The traditional signs – misspelled names, incorrect seals, wrong fonts, implausible course durations – are no longer a reliable guide. A well-made fake today is visually indistinguishable from a genuine document.

That said, some indicators still warrant scrutiny:

• Qualifications from institutions with no verifiable online presence or accreditation status
• Course durations that do not align with what would normally be expected for that level of qualification
• Credentials that cannot be verified through the issuing institution via independently sourced contact details
• PDF documents with inconsistent metadata, altered fonts, or mismatched formatting
• Credentials from distance learning programmes with no assessment records or transcripts to support them

The honest answer, however, is that checking for these signs is no longer sufficient on its own.

Yes – and this is one of the most significant developments in credential fraud in recent years. Fraudsters now use AI-powered design tools to produce fake diplomas and transcripts that are near-perfect replicas of genuine documents. AI can also generate convincing fake institutional websites to support them, complete with pages that appear to offer verification but return false results.

In 2024 alone, digital diploma forgery increased by 244% year on year. Fraud-as-a-Service platforms on the dark web allow anyone to purchase high-quality fake credentials without any technical knowledge. The result is that visual inspection – however careful – is no longer a reliable method of detecting a fake. Even experienced admissions staff and HR professionals cannot consistently distinguish a well-made fake PDF from a genuine one.

Using a fake credential to obtain employment, a professional licence, or a regulated position typically constitutes fraud and is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions. Sentences of several years in prison have been handed down in documented cases – including the seven-year sentence handed to Zholia Alemi in the UK, and multiple convictions following Operation Nightingale in the US. Where harm results – as in the engineering and aviation cases above – charges can extend to manslaughter.

For organisations, the risks run in both directions. Hiring an unqualified person on the basis of a fake credential can expose an employer to significant legal liability, particularly in regulated sectors. Failing to verify credentials adequately is itself a compliance failure in many industries.

The only verification method that is genuinely fraud-resistant is one where the check is made directly against the original record held by the issuing institution – not against the document presented by the candidate.

Digital credentials make this possible. When a credential is issued digitally, any verification check is made against the permanent, unalterable original record. A candidate cannot alter a digital credential, because the record they would need to alter is not in their possession – it is held by the institution.

For paper or PDF credentials, the options are more limited. The most reliable approach is to contact the issuing institution directly – using independently verified contact details, not those provided by the candidate – and request confirmation. This is slow, resource-intensive, and increasingly easy to circumvent when AI can generate a convincing fake institution on demand.

The honest answer is that most credentials in circulation today are still paper or PDF – and for institutions receiving large volumes of applications, particularly from international applicants, manual verification is slow, resource-intensive, and increasingly unreliable as AI-generated fakes become harder to detect.

If the credentials you receive cannot be verified against a digital source, the following steps reduce – though cannot eliminate – the risk:

Treat any credential that cannot be independently verified with appropriate caution, regardless of how convincing it appears

Contact the issuing institution directly via independently sourced contact details – not those provided by the applicant

Confirm that the institution is accredited by the relevant national or international authority

Check for consistency in formatting, course lengths, qualification types, and dates

For international credentials, verify what the qualification actually corresponds to in your own national context – grading scales and qualification levels vary significantly across education systems

For institutions processing significant volumes of incoming credentials – universities, professional bodies, and certification authorities – Diplomasafe’s credential verification service automates and scales this process. The service verifies documents against EMREX and national registries, supports identity verification through 35+ European eID methods as well as face-against-passport checks for applicants from countries without digital identity infrastructure, and translates foreign grading scales into a comparable local context. Where a credential cannot be verified digitally, Diplomasafe contacts the issuing institution directly to confirm authenticity – because for the majority of the world, digital credentials are not yet the norm, and that gap has to be bridged.

As the EUDI Wallet becomes standard across EU member states – with all public universities required to be able to receive EUDI Wallet credentials by the end of 2026 – verified digital credentials will increasingly arrive automatically. Diplomasafe is already built for that transition.

Digital credential issuance. An institution that issues only paper or PDF credentials creates documents that can be falsified. An institution that issues verifiable digital credentials makes fraud structurally impossible – because there is nothing to falsify. The original record is held by the institution, and any verification check is made against that record directly.

As AI lowers the barrier to producing convincing fakes, the question is no longer whether digital issuance is worth the effort. It is whether paper-based issuance is still defensible at all.

Diplomasafe addresses both sides of the problem: helping institutions issue credentials that cannot be faked, and helping organisations verify the credentials they receive – whether those credentials were issued digitally or arrived as paper or PDF.