This incident may seem right out of a Bollywood thriller but it actually happened. A woman took on her elder sister’s identity to join a job that her sibling was selected for. Except the elder sister was dead. It was when the employer ran a background check that the truth was revealed.
Cases like this and many more are all in a day’s job for Gurugram-based AuthBridge, which offers services such as instant identity verification, employment background screening, customer screening, and partner due diligence. The company, which works with several Fortune 500 employers across the country, foiled the identity theft attempt.
AuthBridge CEO and Founder Ajay Trehan details how the incident unfolded. “After the employer reached out to us for a background screening, we went to the candidate’s previous employer. They asked us why we were screening her, as she is dead. We sent the employee’s photo and they said this is not the girl. They also sent us the hospital’s medical report of her death.”
After this, the Gurugram startup confronted the employee, who admitted to assuming her sister’s identity to join the company. The deceased, who had five years of work experience, had applied for the BPO job before her death.
Ajay, an IIT-Delhi alumnus, recounts another interesting case where the CEO of a mid-sized IT company with 18 years of work experience was found to have furnished fake IIT and IIM degrees.
“After a month of the CEO taking charge, there were murmurs within the company. The employees were of the opinion that the guy’s skills were not in line with an IIT-IIM graduate’s. That is when we came into the picture,” Ajay says.
Both the IIT and IIM degrees furnished were quite old, dating to 1985 and 1987, respectively. While IIM-Ahmedabad was quick to react and came back the very next day after the query was sent to them, IIT-BHU (Banaras Hindu University) took 60 days to confirm that the fraudulent CEO was never a part of the institute.
According to AuthBridge, around 10 percent of the cases they take up every month have discrepancies. However, some discrepancies can be easily resolved. One such case had to do with hiring for an international board. The candidate had a $40 traffic violation in the US, which was still open after several years.
“Being part of an international board means that you may come under the scrutiny of global regulators. And if something like this were to come out, even though it is not a big offence, it would bring embarrassment to the board and the individual. We asked the candidate to settle the fine, after which the offer was rolled out,” Ajay says.
Other times, the upshot’s not so simple. A male teacher who had been teaching in a Dehradun school for several years was revealed to have been part of the CBI’s most wanted list. The shocking revelation was made when the school decided to run a routine check of its staff through the Gurugram company.
That’s why AuthBridge now runs checks for recruitments and existing staff across the board - starting from drivers to company board members.
To check the reputation of the candidate, AuthBridge uses aggregated data from digitised court and litigation records
How it started
AuthBridge was founded in 2005 with the premise of creating a platform for employee background screening services. Prior to starting AuthBridge, Ajay ran a BPO company offering services to the US and the UK.
“I would ask my HR whether we had background checks on employees and there would be nothing,” Ajay remembers. During his trips to the US, Ajay came across background screening companies. He realised there was a massive opportunity back home to tap into the sector and formed a small team of three-four people to experiment with the format in August 2005.
“No one was doing it in India then. And this was not detective work. This was a research-based KPO opportunity. I spoke to HR people and everyone said they were looking for a service like this. I realised the huge opportunity that lay unexplored,” Ajay says.
It took the company around four months to figure out how to go about their work, the founder admits candidly. “However, we broadly knew what we wanted to do. To authenticate educational and employment background,” he says.
In 2006, AuthBridge got its first contract. From a skeletal team, the company now has over a 1,000 employees, having served 1,400 clients.
The tech pivot
Around the time the team size reached 30, the company realised that unless they “brought in tech and thought of doing business in a radically different way” they could not scale up. And so in 2007-08, it turned to automation.
“As the client base was growing we were ending up calling or getting in touch with the same universities and organisations. We realised it was time to automate,” Ajay says. AuthBridge started creating a year-by-year database of graduating classes and employment records for quick cross-checks. Their database currently has 300 million records that it has aggregated over the years.
Since the company holds a lot of private information, the automation engines also made sure that the data was available only on a need-to-know basis. It ensured strict control on the viewing and dissemination of data.
The company currently screens 15,000-20,000 candidates on a daily basis. The three broad buckets it looks into while assessing a candidate are identity, profile, and reputation. As part of the identity check, it looks at all identities of a candidate, including PAN, driving licence, passport, etc. The company uses government licensed APIs (application programming interface) to verify these. The profile check includes verifying education and employment history through AuthBridge’s proprietary software.