
Ask HN: Is “employee fraud” a legitimate thing to worry about in hiring? - nervousemployee
&gt; Long story short: I got laid off from a startup and really needed a job. I wrote on my resume I have multiple agile&#x2F;scrum certifications, such as SAFe, CSPO, and CSM (which is a lie). I recently got hired to be a product manager at a corporate company. My new boss decided to search for my name on the Scrum Alliance website, which he is also a member of, to obviously no avail because it doesn&#x27;t exist. To buy myself time, I sent him a photoshopped image of a certificate with my name and certification # on it, and said there is probably just a snag with updates to the web search and to not worry about it.<p>My question is: If management finds out, what are the possible consequences that could result from this? If I get fired for my dishonesty, I will accept that. Mostly, I am panicking about potentially getting sued.<p>*Ethically, I know what I did was wrong. I&#x27;m not proud of it. I did it because I was only trying to meet the desired job qualifications, and didn&#x27;t have the money&#x2F;time to properly get the certifications while unemployed, which I know is not an excuse. I am 100% not advocating people use dishonesty like this, because as I am seeing it does come back to bite. I take full responsibility for being an asshole for doing this. All I wanted was to find a job quickly to pay the bills...
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akerl_
A couple of parallel points are worth noting:

* It’s likely that they’re going to discover it and you’ll lose your job.

* Sending the forged certificate made the likelihood of this strictly worse, by doubling down on the lie.

* You almost certainly would have gotten the job had you omitted the certification that you don’t have, because posted job quals in tech are literally all suggestions, regardless of what the surrounding text says (with the exception of a few very narrow fields with regulatory/compliance requirements).

* Your best outcome at present is probably to come clean to your manager rather than letting this play out organically.

* Your ideal end state is almost certainly not keeping this job, but trying to mitigate the chances this will affect future jobs. Thankfully, generally speaking, it’s unlikely they’ll waste time attempting legal remedies, and it’s also unlikely that HR is going to go into details about your actions if questioned by a potential future employer, but the distinction between “So-and-so worked here from $start to $end”, “So-and-so worked here from $start to $end and was terminated with cause”, and “So-and-so worked here from $start to $end and was terminated for fraud” are material to your future job prospects.

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nightfly
The worst outcome is this will effect your hiring prospects in the future.

