Sluggish Job Market Invites “Dangerous Temptation”

Mr. Lee confessed, “I couldn’t report to the police since I requested an online site to forge a college transcript. I am afraid that my I.D. number and address would be used for ill purposes.”

As the employment situation worsens, fake transcripts from prestigious universities are found everywhere. Especially, some swindlers have been using the job seekers’ uneasy psychology by alluring them to buy fake college transcripts and abusing their private information after taking their money, which leads to another crime.

The easiest path to acquiring forged transcripts is through job-related or online loan service cafes on Internet sites that attract job hunters by providing information on employment and loans with them.

The Information Communication Ethics Committee took correction measures after it found more than 200 cases of illegal dealings on online sites regarding counterfeit college transcripts and national certificates in August alone.

On “D” site, one of the most popular portal online sites in the country, visitors or members cannot run a search engine with the word “fake” as a rule when they search for café names. However, some Internet service providers are enticing job seekers by using alternative words such as “weejoe,” written in English which sounds the same as “fake” in Korean, in their café names.

Also, a site named “graduation” offers counseling for job seekers who have flocked to the site after learning about it by word of mouth and provides them with “tailor-made service” that makes fake transcripts for their clients.

Personnel managers from conglomerates including Samsung, Hyundai, and LG raised the same voice that there was no way to distinguish real transcripts from fake ones if they were presented in employee selections. They say in the situation that tens of thousand applications are sent out for hundreds of job openings, it is hard to examine the genuineness of each document.

A personnel manager from Hyundai Motor Co. said, “Not only after the paper-screening of the company but also after the final employee selection is it impossible to call every college from which hundreds of applicants graduated in order to confirm their graduation.” He demanded, “We need to introduce a recruiting system that can detect fake documents.”

An official from the National Police Agency`s cyber crime investigation squad said, “It is impossible for us to detect recently forged college transcripts. Even their holograms look real.” He added, “Victims who had financial loss in the process of asking for fake documents won’t want to report to police, which makes investigations even harder.”

“Even when you requested counterfeits on Internet sites, it is not punishable if you didn’t use them. Please report to the police in that case. It is highly likely that your I.D. numbers and names could be sold on the Internet for future crimes, so please be careful,” he insisted.

Se-Jin Jung mint4a@donga.com