Nothing like the real thing

You think a few porkies on your CV won't matter. But it depends how far you go. By Oliver Bennett

A false doctor was unmasked this week. Godwin Onobogu's portfolio of bogus but expensive services included acting as witness for drink-drive defendants, foxing the beaks with jargon such as "aberrant physiology", and as a doctor of sexually transmitted diseases, enabling him to make whimsical misdiagnoses, and to examine female patients intimately in his "forensic laboratory". He went down for five years. Also this week, it emerged that an Oxford undergraduate, Katherine Rainwood (who had changed her name when she left school) was expelled for cheating in her finals by using a personal computer - it is alleged that she downloaded an essay she had written earlier.

Last month also saw some exciting frauds. Soraya Yuksel was convicted of defrauding Warwick University out of pounds 200,000 when it transpired that she had been using false qualifications, including a fake PhD and MA. "Pupils say she was a very good teacher," said a shocked spokesman for the institution. Then there was the fake nurse Yolanda Ruddle, who fooled hospital staff to the extent that she was able to give a morphine injection to a patient. Lo and behold, she also turned out to be a male-to-female transsexual.

Fakers are everywhere, and they often seem to be drawn to tasks with high prestige, public sympathy and responsibility, such as the medical world. There was even a case of a bogus astronaut this year, who tricked his way as far as the console for Mission Control in Houston. Those despicable bogus council workmen who rip off old ladies have nothing on this lot.

These may seem like isolated cases, but some people think that fakery is flourishing, particularly low-level, day-to-day deception. According to a survey published in July by the Association of Search and Selection Consultants, some 25 per cent of CVs now include lies. "They range from out-and-out skulduggery from bankrupts and convicted frauds, to cases where people are gilding the lily," says Michael Maule of the ASSC, who believes that faking CVs is becoming more prevalent and socially acceptable. "These days, little white lies are considered OK. But where do they stop?" Could it be like the Zero Tolerance concept - that they provide the seedbed for larger fakes to flourish?

Maule gives some classic examples of "gilding the lily" that will surely make many of us blush. "People with patchy careers cover up gaps by extending the times of employment. A lot of people bump up C grades to A grades. And lots upgrade their salaries and job descriptions." He does not approve. "A CV is a legally binding document, and if it proves to be fictional then you should be dismissed." The problem is so widespread that Maule says that there are companies that specialise in checking CVs, particularly in the City, where the financial risks are highest.

Other recruitment consultants are more sanguine. "A CV is a sales pitch and people embellish them all the time," says Paul Farrer, of the graduate recruitment consultants Phee Farrer Jones. "People often lie about their interests, and many put `sport' because it looks healthy. At the interview they are asked; `What sort of sports do you play?' I've seen people reply `Oh, I don't play sports, I watch them on telly'."

Adding languages is another classic of the creative CV. "Candidates love to put `spoken French, Spanish and Italian' when all they can do is order a beer," says Farrer, who often requires phoney linguists to demonstrate their ability to order spare parts in French on the spot. People also claim to have technical abilities they do not possess, particularly in the information technology market. "They write down anything they've heard of, and if you challenge them they say: `Ah, yes. I need to refresh myself with that program'."

References are getting blander owing to fear of litigation, adds Farrer. And it is a convenient function of the new ill of age discrimination that you can legitimately withhold your age, though this can lead to a lifetime's subterfuge: someone I know has lopped two years off her age for so long that she had to hide rom colleagues the fact that she had turned 40. Few of us, however, can be as audacious as Tony De Silva, who two months ago sneaked back into school at the age of 26. "Tony Blair's always going on about education, and I took him at his word," pleaded Tony, who wanted another chance at life.

Not many of these are dismissal offences, and they pale with time. Who knows or cares after our late twenties whether our A-levels have been massaged up a grade, unless you are Lord Archer? As the authors of our own stories, is it not sometimes important to grab attention by using the cub reporter's dictum: "simplify and exaggerate". "We're not wildly concerned about low-level stuff," adds Farrer. "The important things are easy to check."

But some believe that the culture of embellishment leaks into fully fledged fraud. "Fiddling CVs is the tip of a vast iceberg of moral and intellectual corruption," says Dennis O'Keeffe, of the think-tank the Social Affairs Unit, who is also a lecturer in sociology at North London University. "Our society is becoming more dishonest."

In the past, says O'Keeffe, to fiddle, fib and blag was recognised as wrong. "There was a consensus society, and anyone caught lying would have felt shame. It would be demeaning to embellish a CV." But now a chancer's culture has emerged, where the key question is: can I get away with it?

With the protection of constructs such as political correctness and the litigation society, O'Keeffe says that the bullshitters can be well rewarded. "In America, it is on an enormous scale. Charlatans have top jobs in major universities there." His sticking-plaster solution would be a decade of rigorous checking, "so that people know that they will be caught", but in the the long term there would have to be a return to basic moral training.

"There is no emphasis on mainstream morality any more, only pseudo-morality," he says.

But in the global employment market-place, increased movement between jobs and better forging technology - personal computers have been a boon to the bogus - the fakers' market is growing and becoming more professional. "I know exactly where to go to buy phoney degrees from the University of Cockfosters or wherever," says Michael Maule, who adds that some even provide fake referees so that people can "check" fake references. Indeed, such a "university" was busted just last month, when an airline pilot, Kevin Stevens, was exposed as running the entirely bogus University of Yorkshire from his home on a Harrogate Housing Estate, offering callers the chance to acquire BA and BSc degrees for pounds 318 and an optional extra of "honours" for pounds 54.

There is a higher level of fraudulence when people assume different identities; a process that often includes a degree of folie de grandeur. Earlier this year, a certain Lord De Chanson - who came into the world as Craig Tuck - managed to con many wealthy people into appearing in a directory of the nation's richest individuals which, unsurprisingly, never appeared. And who can forget "Lady" Rosemary Aberdour, whose three-year fantasy binge in the late Eighties squandered pounds 2.7m worth of embezzled charity money?

I have seen the bogus aristo sting in action personally, when I briefly had dealings with a publisher of toff directories. Here, one of the directors would la-di-dah her voice up and become "Lady Caroline" when selling advertising space to American clients. Horrible.

Other cases of changed identity have a certain poignancy, particularly when they are good at their chosen tasks. Last month, the Puerto Rican jockey Angel Jacobs - also known as Carlos Castro and Angel Monserrate - was unmasked as having been banned from racing in the US in 1995, after failing drug tests. But he was still a great jockey. With many bogus practitioners, the lie is at the core of their selfhood. As Maule says: "If you repeat a lie a sufficient number of times, you start to believe it. The lie becomes part of your reality."

But don't weep for the phoneys. "At worst, their actions make society vulnerable, particularly in jobs where the level of education is essential to doing it properly," says Maule. Think of that, next time you add an A-level to your CV.