Arshia Kaur, founder of Tint Cosmetics, hired what she thought was a Head of Marketing. The candidate had a polished resume, two years of experience at a mid-sized D2C brand, and salary slips to prove it.
The salary slips were made in Microsoft Excel. She only caught it because one of them showed the candidate had worked 31 out of 31 days in the month — no weekends, no holidays, 31 consecutive days of attendance logged in a month that has 31 days.
That's how most people get caught: a small number that doesn't add up. Not a forensic audit. Not a specialist BGV firm. A Sunday that someone forgot to subtract.
The question isn't whether fake experience exists in Indian hiring. It does, at scale, and it has for years. The question is how organised it's become — and how most companies, especially placement agencies and early-stage startups, are entirely unprepared for it.
What you actually get for ₹15,000
A basic "experience kit" — the term used in the Telegram groups and WhatsApp networks where these are sold — includes everything a candidate needs to pass a standard HR review:
- Offer and appointment letters on professional letterhead, with forged signatures of fictitious HR managers
- Three to six months of salary slips, including realistic deductions for Provident Fund and Professional Tax
- A relieving letter and experience certificate confirming the tenure
- A functional HR email address to reply to verification requests
That's the ₹7,500–₹12,000 tier. The basic one. No live support.
At ₹15,000–₹25,000, you get a "Standard" package: a shadow company with its own registration, a dedicated email domain, and a human being on the other end of that email who will respond to reference check queries as an HR executive.
At ₹35,000–₹60,000, the premium tier adds forged Form 16s, manipulated bank statements, and telephonic verification — someone who will pick up the phone when your hiring team calls to verify employment.
And if someone is trying to get an H-1B visa or a European work permit using faked experience, that market runs from ₹1.5 lakh to ₹6 lakh per package.
The two main physical hubs for this industry are Ameerpet in Hyderabad and Marathahalli in Bengaluru. Both are areas historically associated with IT training institutes. Some of those institutes built a side business that turned out to be more profitable than the training.
The numbers are worse than you think
According to the AuthBridge Annual Trend Report for 2024, roughly 15–17% of all resumes submitted in India contain verified discrepancies. That's not embellishment — overstating a job title or rounding up a percentage. That's a discrepancy that a background verification firm flagged after investigation.
In high-volume IT recruitment cycles, that number reaches 30%.
One in six candidates. In IT roles during peak hiring, closer to one in three.
The NASSCOM Talent Integrity Survey from 2024 found that employment fraud cases spiked 44% compared to the previous year. And 56% of hiring managers said they personally detected resume fraud in the last twelve months.
This isn't a niche problem. It's operating at industrial scale.
The shadow company ecosystem
The reason fake experience kits have become so sophisticated is that a whole parallel industry has grown up around making them survive BGV.
Shadow companies — entities set up purely to be listed as a former employer — have names designed to pass a quick glance. Instance Software Solutions. JVS Infotech. CBK Infotech. They're registered businesses. They have websites. They have HR email addresses. Some have LinkedIn company pages with stock-photo employees.
In 2024, a Bengaluru-based operation run by Jimutesh Sharma was busted for providing forged letters and live HR call support to over 200 professionals who were, at the time of the bust, employed at major MNCs. Two hundred people with jobs at real companies, verified by shadow companies, right now.
Accenture and TCS both conducted large internal audits in 2024–2025. Both resulted in what the companies called "involuntary attrition" — a phrase that means termination after discovering fraudulent credentials — affecting thousands of employees.
These weren't junior employees. The fraud scales with the package tier. The more someone is willing to pay, the better their fake credentials look, and the further they can get in their career before being caught.
Who gets hurt most
Enterprise companies with dedicated BGV processes and compliance teams eventually catch most of this. It takes them time, and some cases slip through, but the infrastructure exists.
Placement agencies and startups are a different story.
A professional BGV check costs ₹2,000–₹5,000 per candidate. For an agency placing 50 people a month, that's ₹1–2.5 lakh in verification costs before you've made a single placement fee. Most agencies don't run it on every candidate. They rely on a LinkedIn check, a quick call, and their gut.
Startups are worse. The mode is always "hire yesterday." There's no 10-day BGV window when a founder needs an engineer to start Monday. So they skip it. They look at the resume, they do two interviews, they make an offer. The fake experience that would have taken a BGV firm two days to surface never gets checked at all.
The startup pays the price later — usually when the person underperforms in ways that don't make sense for someone with their stated experience, or when a client relationship breaks down because the "senior consultant" doesn't know what they're supposed to know.
Placement agencies pay a different price. When an agency places a candidate who turns out to have fabricated their credentials, the client loses trust in the agency. Not in the hiring process. In the agency. That's the placement fee returned, the relationship damaged, and the word spreading to other companies in that network.
How to actually catch it
The most reliable check in India is the EPFO UAN verification. Every salaried employee with PF contributions has a Universal Account Number, and the EPFO records show exactly which employers made contributions, and when. If a candidate claims two years at a company but there are no PF contributions from that employer in that period, the employment didn't happen.
Shadow companies know this. The premium-tier kits include PF contribution faking — which requires more coordination and leaves more traces. But the basic and standard kits rarely cover this, which is why EPFO verification catches most fraud that has any documentation at all.
Form 26AS, the tax credit statement, is the second layer. It shows TDS deducted by employers, linked to PAN. If the salary slips show ₹8 lakh per year but the Form 26AS shows no TDS from that employer for that period, the slips are fake.
After that: domain age. A company that's been operating for five years with a website registered three months ago is not a five-year-old company. BGV firms maintain blacklists of known shadow company domains. They also check whether the registered office address is a real office or a residential flat in Koramangala.
And then there's the Arshia Kaur method. Look at the salary slip. Count the working days. See if someone forgot that July has Sundays.
What's coming
The government has been building toward an Aadhaar-linked employment history system through DigiLocker. The idea is that verified employment records — contributed by employers at the time of joining and exit — would be cryptographically linked to a candidate's Aadhaar identity, making it impossible to fabricate without compromising the underlying government database.
NASSCOM has been piloting a Talent Credentialing system along similar lines. AuthBridge and IDfy are moving toward blockchain-verified credential records.
If any of this reaches full adoption, the shadow company business model collapses. You can't fake a blockchain entry. You can't create a PF contribution that never existed once everything is linked to a single verified identity.
That's probably 2027–2028, optimistically. Until then, the fake experience market exists because the verification infrastructure is fragmented, manual, and expensive enough that most companies skip it.
What this means for your agency right now
The agencies I talk to most often surface this problem through a different route than a formal BGV check. They catch it because a candidate's answers in an interview don't match the depth of experience on their resume. The conversation about "your last role" goes shallow too quickly. The technical questions reveal gaps that three years of experience shouldn't leave.
That's actually what well-designed screening should do — not just match keywords and rank by relevance, but flag when a candidate's profile doesn't hold together. When the claimed seniority doesn't match the vocabulary they use to describe their work. When the trajectory on paper looks too clean to be real.
This is part of what we're building into Zynq AI — not a BGV replacement (you still need EPFO verification for anything critical), but a first-pass filter that catches inconsistencies before you invest interview time. A candidate claiming five years of fintech experience who can't describe a payment reconciliation process in any meaningful way is a different kind of red flag from the classic keyword mismatch, and the screening layer should be able to surface it.
We're in early access right now. If you run a placement agency and you've had even one placement blow up because of credential fraud, I'd like to talk to you about what we're building.
Join the waitlist at zynqai.in — and reach out directly if you want to share what you're seeing in your market. The patterns from Pune look different from the patterns in Hyderabad, and every conversation makes the product better.