Cheaters: Inside the hidden world of IT certification fraud

The VAR factor

But sometimes it is employers who encourage employees to get certified using any means necessary. For example, a systems integrator or value-added reseller (VAR) might want to get authorized to sell a particular vendor's product. Authorization might require that the company have one or more certified professionals on staff.

"If a VAR helps his employees cheat to get a certification in order to get or stay authorized, the company's customers are affected, as well as the vendor that the VAR represents," Ripley says. "Say someone cheats to reach the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner level. If the VAR implements a poorly designed solution, the customer has wasted his money and he thinks Microsoft has bad products. Everyone loses when this happens."

Rick Gregory, managing director of the training community of TrainingIndustry.com, has heard of instances in which outsourcing contracts are being canceled and the work is being brought back in-house because the people assigned to the contract simply weren't qualified. "The contract specified a requirement for specific kinds of certified professionals, so the people went out and purchased a credential," Gregory says. In the end, the work was below standards set in the outsourcing agreement.

Vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco and third-party agencies like the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) and the Storage Industry Networking Association (SNIA) that sponsor certification programs lose both money and intellectual property when even one exam is compromised. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take numerous subject matter experts three to six months to develop a certification test.

"We hear from candidates that some of our tests are readily available," IBM's Cooper says. "It's a compromise of our [intellectual property]. Our internal sponsors wonder about the validity of the tests. They typically don't need to rewrite the tests, but they need forensics to understand the impact to the test scores. Nevertheless, the perception is that damage has been done."