Doctor?
I wish this was a single isolated incident. However, there are at least two examples of this that I am aware of.
To avoid confusion later on, I thought I would deal with both of these at the same time.
Both of these individuals claim to be experts in building pathology. Both claim to have PhDs.
Person A
This individual works as an expert witness. I had the misfortune of seeing a few of his reports a few years ago.
This individual claims to have a BSc, MSc, and PhD. When giving evidence, he said that he did all of these degrees consecutively.
He provided a copy of his alleged PhD certificate to my client and this was later passed on to me. The document is clearly a fake and a forgery.
A few key points:
- The PhD was apparently awarded in October 1993. This individual was born in May 1969. This would mean that he had completed his BSc, MSc, and PhD by age 24. Extremely unlikely, if not impossible. All 3 degrees would take a minimum of 7 years to do full time.
- The document was apparently signed by Vice-Chancellor Vincent Watts in 1993. However, that clearly didn’t happen as Vincent Watts didn’t actually become Vice-Chancellor until 1997.
- The name of the university campus is spelt wrong.
- The name of the degree on the certificate makes no sense whatsoever. A PhD is a research degree and not a taught degree.
- The two universities that would hold the records responded to my client in writing, and I’ve seen both of the letters. They confirmed that they have checked their records and found no record of this individual anywhere. If there was to be a final nail in the coffin, that would be it.
For the craic, I decided to get ChatGPT to make a fake degree certificate. All this took was a quick Google Images search to find a genuine degree certificate from that period. Handing that to ChatGPT, and about 60 seconds worth of prompting later, this was the result. What do you think?
Person B
You’ll occasionally find this person on LinkedIn being extremely vocal about everyone else’s qualifications. Where I’m from, we call that “giving it the biggun”. Anyway, it turns out their qualifications aren’t much to write home about either.
They claim to have a PhD in building pathology.
The university that apparently awarded this degree is one that I had never heard of. So I decided to do a bit of digging.
It turns out this university isn’t actually a university at all. It’s based overseas, with a peculiar chain of shell companies, and isn’t recognised as a university even in its country of origin.
I managed to find this organisation’s Wikipedia page. This is an excerpt which has been translated from German.
“On its website, it states that it does not have state accreditation as a higher education institution and that the “degrees” it awards are not recognised academic degrees. Rather, the titles awarded are intended to give “graduates” the opportunity to have their practical and personal skills acquired outside of higher education certified in the form of an academic-looking diploma. [5]
The institution gained notoriety in German-speaking countries in 2021 after it became known that politician [redacted] had obtained a purported doctorate from [redacted] in March 2020 as part of a doctoral program lasting only three months, and subsequently appeared in public with the academic title “Dr.” until the affair was exposed. [6]”
A quick look on the organisation’s website and it is obvious this is not a proper university or PhD.
Final thoughts
I don’t care if someone has a PhD or not. To be honest, it doesn’t impress me. Titles are just titles. I take each person I meet as I find them.
But if you are going to call yourself “Dr”, at least have an actual PhD from a genuine university. If you don’t, you just look a bit silly.
NB. Both of these individuals are members of RICS and have been reported. Let’s see if anything happens!