How to Spot a Fake Diploma: What Employers Should Know

Imagine that you’ve just hired a new employee you’re excited to work with. They have impeccable credentials and a degree from a respected university. But it turns out that they’re awful. They’re saying or doing things that could violate HIPAA, or they’re engaging recklessly with machinery or equipment they should know well.

In short, they just don’t know what they’re doing. So you take a closer look at their history. As it turns out, that respected degree is no degree at all. 

Hiring an unqualified person with sham credentials can hurt your company’s reputation and damage customer relationships. In some fields, it can even put lives at risk. 

You need someone with the right credentials who can step into the role and have a positive impact. But when you’re reviewing a candidate’s application, how can you be sure they really earned the diploma or certificate they’ve listed?

Fake diplomas, degrees, and certificates are easy to buy online. They can even be generated through artificial intelligence. And worst of all, these fake credentials can look really convincing, at least on the surface. 

In this article, you’ll learn tips for how to spot a fake diploma. We’ll cover the problems these fraudulent credentials can cause and share how you can verify a candidate’s education with a thorough background check.  

Table of Contents

1. 5 Defining Features To Look For

2. Downfalls of Hiring Someone With a Fake Diploma 

3. How To Verify a Diploma’s Authenticity

4. Verify Diploma Legitimacy With Cisive 

5. Protect Your Hiring Process With Cisive 

5 Defining Features To Look For

Whether it’s odd degree timelines, suspicious institution names, or mismatched documentation, there are many potential red flags you should be looking for. By knowing the warning signs of fake academic credentials, you’ll have a head start on identifying and addressing false education claims. 

When you know these signs, you can avoid becoming a victim of diploma fraud, unlike the unsuspecting organizations duped in the massive Florida nursing diploma scheme. 

In that scheme, schools gave fraudulent credentials to thousands of people who went on to take the board exams. Nearly half (40% percent) passed and went on to become nurses at organizations just like yours, despite missing hours of training and experience. 

Preserve your organization’s reputation and avoid hiring people who may harm your workforce or customers. Below are five critical indicators to help hiring teams exercise due diligence and hire with confidence.

1. Seal 

How does a real diploma look? Well, to start, almost all diplomas have a seal. The seal is supposed to help prevent forgery and serve as proof that the document was issued by the school. 

Most schools have complex seals that are supposed to make them harder to replicate. Seals are usually raised and embossed with gold or another color of foil, but they can be multicolored or printed thermographically instead.

As an HR manager or talent recruiter, you should learn how to spot a fake diploma by knowing how to find issues with the seal. For example, the seal might be unusually dull or flat. The edges could be blurry. The colors could be off, or the texture might be inconsistent. Any of these could be signs that you’re looking at a forgery.

2. Inconsistent Fonts

Legitimate educational institutions use a uniform typeface for their documents. They want their diplomas to look impressive and prestigious, so they choose fonts they feel meet those goals and stick with them. Forged diplomas, on the other hand, might mix multiple fonts or apply styles that aren’t on-brand for a given school. 

Look for strange spacing, mismatched fonts, and other oddities when reviewing a diploma or transcript. You could even consider running the diploma through an optical character recognition (OCR) scanner to identify inconsistencies, including potentially manipulated metadata.

3. Lack of Information 

Genuine diplomas have specific details about both the school and the student. Some of the typical details you’ll find on legitimate diplomas include:

• • • • Full name of the issuing institution

      • Recipient’s full name

      • Graduation date

      • Name of degree/certificate received

      • Signatures of school officials

      • A seal (sometimes multiple seals)

      • A watermark that appears when you hold the document up to the light

Anytime you’re presented with a diploma that lacks this basic information, alarm bells should ring in your head. You should immediately start digging to find out as much information as you can about the purported school that issued the diploma. 

4. Too Formal or Too Informal Language 

These days, most schools write their diplomas in fairly straightforward language. They don’t tend to stuff excess Latin phrases onto the paper anymore, although they do certainly still include “cum laude” and similar phrases when the student achieved honors.

Be on the lookout for diplomas that use archaic or overly ornate language. It shouldn’t read like medieval prose or Shakespeare. Similarly, a legitimate degree won’t be phrased too casually, either. The name of the school will not be abbreviated, for example. As an HR person, you should be suspicious if a diploma sounds either too formal or too informal. 

5. Incorrect University Name or Location

Here’s how to spot a fake diploma almost immediately: They get the name of the school wrong.

For example, a fake diploma might say “Tennessee University” instead of “University of Tennessee.” While schools aren’t perfect, they won’t make a mistake as egregious as writing their own name incorrectly on their diplomas. 

As an employer, you should also make it a standard practice to verify the name and location of the schools listed on a candidate’s application. You might be surprised how easily you’ll spot problems with just this basic information.

You should also verify the school’s physical existence. Look up the school online and try to find its zip code. Look on Google Maps to see if you can actually find the school. Search for the school’s website, but beware that some creators of fake diplomas also create very professional-looking websites for the fake university. 

Downfalls of Hiring Someone With a Fake Diploma

Hiring someone with fraudulent credentials can have serious consequences for any organization. It can impact everything from internal morale to public perception. 

That’s why every business should conduct rigorous education verifications like those offered by Cisive. And every organization should adopt best practices to detect fraudulent credentials. 

Here are just three problems that can result if you don’t know how to spot a fake diploma and end up hiring someone with false credentials.

Legal Liabilities

Hiring someone based on a fake diploma can lead to legal issues for your company if that employee goes on to harm someone in the course of business. You might face a lawsuit for negligent hiring, professional negligence, or other related claims. 

In a field like healthcare, an unqualified person could go on to physically injure someone. Their lack of experience and training could also result in HIPAA violations. In these cases, your company could be sued for malpractice or negligence, and you could face heavy fines as well as increased regulatory scrutiny.

Similarly, in financial services, someone with falsified credentials could go on to mishandle customer funds or engage in other misconduct. In that case, you could face lawsuits or even criminal proceedings, depending on what exactly the employee did. 

Damage to Company Reputation 

When the public finds out that a company hired someone with fake credentials, it can undermine the company’s reputation. News of falsified credentials can cause people to question the integrity of your vetting process. 

Customers, vendors, and other partners may lose confidence in the rest of your team and in your company. Ultimately, they may take their business elsewhere. Trusted team members may also leave. If you’re in a regulated industry like healthcare or finance, this could escalate into a public scandal, tarnishing your image for years. 

Financial Losses 

Employing someone with a fake diploma costs you money at every step. The money spent on recruitment and onboarding was wasted. You also end up paying salary and benefits to someone who was unqualified — plus, if or when they underperform, you’re incurring expenses to correct those issues. 

Once the forgery is discovered and the person is fired, you’ll need to rehire for the position, adding to recruitment and onboarding costs. In the meantime, you’ll be covering extra support staff or supervision. 

And, as mentioned above, you’ll be doing all this while potentially dealing with costly lawsuits or paying hefty fines. Add it all up, and it would be much cheaper to pay for a background check service than to deal with the financial losses of an unqualified hire.

How To Verify a Diploma’s Authenticity

As technology advances, fake diplomas will only become harder for HR people to detect. It will become even more important that you conduct thorough due diligence during the interview and hiring process. This way, you can minimize the chances of hiring someone who isn’t truly qualified for the job. 

You can start by employing two tactics.

Contact the Issuing University

First, make it a habit to always contact the school that issued the diploma. That sounds simple enough, and sometimes it is. But this method isn’t foolproof. 

Some degree mills have people who answer the phones and “validate” information about any certificate the mill has sold. The people on the phone can be quite convincing and could have you believing that the school is legitimate when it’s really a sham. 

Another potential issue is the fact that legitimate schools often don’t give out the details you might want. Don’t be surprised if you call the registrar only to be told they will not be able to answer your questions. Many legitimate schools hire third parties to handle those questions, and that party might charge a fee. 

Use a Background Check Service

Second, use a trusted background check service that includes verification of education history. These services can efficiently check degrees, attendance, and accreditation records, often integrating with HR systems and delivering results quickly. 

For example, Cisive has a well-developed education verification process. It includes verifications that are conducted by Cisive personnel and uses techniques that make the process easy for educational institutions. 

Verify Diploma Legitimacy With Cisive

While you can attempt to verify education credentials manually, doing so is only getting more difficult. Huge advances in AI tools and other technologies are making it easier than ever for scammers to forge documents. 

The best way to fight that technology is with better technology. That’s why Cisive has invested in creating technology specifically designed for education verification. 

Our tools can verify attendance dates, degrees earned, accreditation status, and more. We even automate emails directly to candidates to alert them about missing information. The system is much faster and more accurate than any manual review, meaning you save time and money and free up your HR team to do other tasks. 

For more information and tips on employment screening, be sure to check our Ultimate Guide to Education Verification Background Checks.

Protect Your Hiring Process With Cisive 

Now you know more about how to spot a fake diploma and how to verify its authenticity. And you know that the mistake of hiring someone with fake credentials can lead to serious ramifications for your company. 

Protect your hiring process by using Cisive’s proven education screening solution. Talk to our experts to learn more about how Cisive can safeguard your hiring process and keep your organization on the right track.