The stamp on that degree? You can buy it on the black market.

The Vetted Workplace

Real hiring mistakes. Real red flags. Real fixes.

An NBFC's CEO got a whistleblower complaint that should never have been possible: several of the company's Relationship Managers hadn't just skipped college. Some hadn't finished school.

The Complaint

Every one of those RMs had a background check on file. Every file said education verified. That's the part that should stop you — not that a few resumes were fake, but that the system built to catch exactly this had already signed off on all of them.

So the question wasn't "how did these hires slip through." It was "what is a background check actually checking, if it can wave through someone who never sat through Class 10?"

The Broken Method Nobody Talks About

Here's the part of background verification most people assume is bulletproof and isn't: education checks in India run on one of two methods.

Method one — the stamp. A verifier sends a candidate's degree to the college, and the college stamps it to confirm it's genuine. Fast. Cheap. Standard practice across most of the industry.

Method two — the letterhead. A verifier goes directly to the university registrar and gets confirmation on official letterhead — a much harder record to fabricate. This is the version every credible verification company will tell you is "more stringent." It's also slower — turnaround can run anywhere from a week to over a month depending on the institution — and it usually costs more.

Guess which one most of the market defaults to.

Now here's the part that makes the stamp method genuinely dangerous, not just imperfect: stamps can be bought. In December 2025, Kerala Police cracked a nationwide racket that had manufactured roughly 100,000 fake degree certificates across 22 universities — complete with forged seals, forged stamps, holograms, and signatures, good enough to pass casual inspection. Eleven people were arrested, including the alleged kingpin, a repeat offender who'd been caught running the same scheme over a decade earlier. Investigators believe over a million fake degrees from this network alone may already be in circulation, with individual certificates reportedly selling for anywhere from ₹75,000 to ₹1.5 lakh apiece. This wasn't a small-time operation. It had a production hub, a distribution network, and agents running it across eight states.

Meanwhile, UGC's official list of fake universities has grown — from around 21-22 in 2024 to 32 institutions by early 2026, spread across more states than before. The oversight gap isn't closing. It's widening.

It isn't only black-market stamps forged onto otherwise real degrees, either. Sometimes the "university" itself is the racket. Uttar Pradesh's Enforcement Directorate recently attached ₹25.44 crore in assets tied to the Monad University fake degree racket — a case where the university's own chairman was arrested and thousands of counterfeit degrees and certificates were seized before the money trail even started getting unwound.

Put those three facts together and the stamp method stops looking like a shortcut. It starts looking like a hole big enough to drive a fraud ring through.

The Test

Here's what actually happened at Millow when this came in.

Vendors who run background checks for other companies get vetted and continuously monitored by us before and after they're onboarded — the same way we'd vet a candidate. As part of that process, we ran a simple test: we sent the exact same degree certificate — same candidate, same university, same document — to two different verification vendors.

Both reports came back "verified." Both had different college stamps for the same degree.

Sit with that for a second. It's the same physical document. There's only one correct stamp, from one specific college registrar. Two different "verified" results on an identical document isn't a discrepancy — it's proof that at least one of those stamps was never checked against the source at all. It was manufactured to look like a pass.

That's not a gap in the process. That's the entire stamp-verification method failing its one job, on command, in a controlled test.

The Fix

The lesson isn't "background checks don't work." It's that not all background checks are checking the same thing, and the cheaper method has a known, exploitable weak point.

What actually closes the gap: going to the source, every time, not the stamp — direct university-registrar confirmation on letterhead, regardless of the extra time and cost. And just as importantly, vetting the vendors who run your checks, not just the candidates they check — because a company can do everything right on its hiring process and still get burned if the verification vendor underneath it is cutting corners.

This is exactly why Millow.io treats its own vendor network the way a good employer should treat candidates: onboarding scrutiny, and continuous monitoring after — including tests like this one — rather than trusting a "verified" stamp at face value.

Millow's CEO recently wrote about this exact gap in India's degree-verification system — worth a read if you want the fuller picture: "Who verified the degree?" on Moneycontrol.

Ever had a "verified" document turn out to be anything but? Reply and tell us — always looking for the next case.

The Vetted Workplace

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Written by the team at Millow.io — see what a background check catches before you make your next hire.