The printing business, which seems to be just any other service business for us, is often a place where information traffic occurs. For example, a photocopy shop deals with a lot of documents including important ones such as diplomas, ID cards, and/or confidential documents. 

With this kind of unsecured circulation of information, document fraud is prone to occur. Not to mention, various information is also vulnerable to be stolen, modified, or misused. 

An apt illustration of this can be seen in a movie called “The Photocopier”. The film, which won 12 Citra trophies at the Indonesian Film Festival (FFI) in 2021, tells how the main character, Sur, and her friend made a living by illegally selling thesis scripts that they stole from students who used their photocopy shop services.

Document fraud case

The involvement of printing businesses in document fraud is nothing new. One of these cases involved a well-known printing company in Indonesia that has numerous branches, wherein its employee got involved in a case of document falsification as a witness.

This case began when the perpetrator came to their shop with a diploma. He asked the employee to add the title “Cum laude” to his diploma. As an employee, he only did what he was requested to without any questions or suspicion. 

A few days later, a police officer came to the shop and asked the employee to be a witness to the criminal act that the perpetrator had committed. 

Efforts of safeguarding reputation

The production and circulation of bogus documents creates a negative impact on the reputation of many parties. Apart from harming the reputation of the named universities and companies that recruit candidates with fake diplomas, reputational threats can also haunt the printing businesses whose services are used by perpetrators to fabricate fake diplomas.

Learning from this case, the printing company then applies a policy that their services do not provide editing of any documents that already bear a signature and stamp. In addition, their service also does not accept laminating of the original certificates because they are worried that the heat of the machine will cause damage to the plastic cover and diploma paper.

This policy is applied to all of the printing service’s branches. The goal, of course, is to protect the company from any reputational risks.

Now, more and more similar companies are realizing the importance of protecting their reputation from the danger of document fraud, that they started implementing similar SOPs. This also narrows the room for counterfeiters to act.

Benefit of candidates screening

Another approach to safeguard the company’s reputation from the threats of document fraud is to do a background screening on the candidates, so that there will be no chance of recruiting a candidate with a fake degree.

The reputation of the universities whose names are engraved on the fraudulent educational documents is also jeopardized. In that case, efforts to safeguard reputation can be undertaken by validating the educational documents of alumni.

A one-stop verification platform is the answer to this problem. Through a one-stop verification platform such as www.demo.education-verification.com, the document verification process will be more efficient in terms of time and resources. 

In the Education Verification platform, the verifier’s name is recorded in the system, which maintains accountability in the verification process. The verification is done in a two-steps process: verification by the academic staff and confirmation by a supervisor, which promotes a check-and-balance process. All results can be accounted for and are guaranteed to be accurate.

Posted by Ajeng

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash