‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!’ said Sir Walter Scott more than 200 years ago. However not much seems to have changed since then! The scheming minds of people who believe that one has to acquire wealth by any means have always been coming up with brilliant and innovative ways of hoodwinking others. Fortunately the battle is not one sided; forces that intend to make this world a better place to live in for all of us have also been working diligently and consistently to outwit the aforementioned scheming minds!

Talking of the present, we live in a world, sadly, where it has become almost impossible to trust anybody without first verifying their background unless of course one enjoys playing with fire and doesn’t mind getting one’s hands burnt every now and then! Considering that information is power, one cannot but reemphasize the significance of the services being rendered by cFIRST. A vital area of our focus to note here is the recruitment of people for employment purposes. It is quite common to find agents selling fake university degrees and ‘experience certificates’ for a fee – the higher the fee the more genuine the certificates look! So much so that once we had an interesting case where the CoE (Controller of Examinations) of a prominent University in India, himself, could not make out the difference between the real and the fake ones! This is the level of expertise and sophistication that we are up against!

Verifying an individual’s credentials and checking his/her background accurately is by itself an onerous task and we also have the sensitive and vital task of interpreting and understanding the information that is collected during the verification process.

In conclusion one can say that the process of background verification of an individual or entity is indispensable to mitigate the various risks involved in associating with that person or entity for various reasons but at the same time the background check report serves it’s rightful purpose only in the hands of a professionally qualified and emotionally mature individual who can interpret it correctly and act on it wisely.