yowkee essential

MSC Trustgate sack its chief scientist

I was reading Start In-tech and went through this article: The pro and his con. To my surprise that is somebody could make up such brilliant credential and thought he could last with that. Isn’t he too smart? The quoted paragraph shows the credential made up by Michael Chong

He had doctorates in digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasting from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); in microelectronics from Cornell University; in manufacturing from the University of Lausanne; and in electrical and computer systems engineering from University of Oklahoma.

This was in addition to MBA and MSc degrees from two Australian universities.

He had worked as executive vice-president for Disney World Technologies, was senior vice-president at Digital Equipment Corp, a vice-president at Aaron Spelling Productions, and a systems coder at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre.

He was then hired as chief scientist by MSC Trustgate to design and develop a DMS. How the fraud was being found? In Tech did a check on his credentials while asking for an interview with him. Then the finding was sent to MDC, which partly owns MSC Trustgate. And at more or less the same time, the company has suspected him while they found his knowledge isn’t reflect what he claimed. To end of the story, he admitted the fraud and surrendered the programming work, yet MSC Trustgate didn’t take legal action against him.

The story sounds pretty familiar. I recalled to read sort-of the same event years ago. First to check on Screenshots, Jeff did blog about this, his reader wrote to him and it seem the guy isn’t doing this for the first time:

The email writer claimed Michael Chong had only one PhD when his Singapore-based dotcom hired the con-artist in 2000 as CTO under similar circumstances: The CTO was leaving. A replacement is needed. IPO was in the works. …

The writer said his company filed a police report in Singapore and admitted that it should have done the same in Malaysia since “he was hired in KL to go to Singapore.”

Wow…it seem there are more stories, but nope, this isn’t what I rememberred. It got to be some cases regarding Singapore dot com company.…later with further searching, I got it:

• Singapore technology whizz sacked for faking credentials
• Post in Usenet: this and this
• And you could still get how the CTO claims their advanced AI technology on Internet

Internet got your footstep. May be company should adopt the habit to do some search on somebody whom they’re going to employ. Or may be they should check if the person got a blog. Would it make sense?