How to Find Out If Someone Lied on Their Resume
A resume is a claim, not a record. The degree, the dates, the title, the license, the glowing reference, all of it is exactly what the person decided you should believe. The way to know whether it is true is the same on every line: stop trusting the document and go check it against the source that issued the original fact. This guide walks through how to verify a degree, employment dates, job titles, a professional license, and references, how to recognize a diploma mill, and the one line that matters most: when you are vetting a vendor or partner for general due diligence versus when you are making a formal hiring decision, which is governed by federal law and must run through a consumer reporting agency with written consent.
The Short Version
To find out if someone lied on their resume, verify each claim against the source that issued it, not against the resume itself. Confirm a degree by going to the school’s registrar or the National Student Clearinghouse, and confirm the school is genuinely accredited through the U.S. Department of Education database, because an unaccredited “diploma mill” sells a real-looking degree for a flat fee. Confirm employment dates and titles with the former employer’s HR line, where many companies confirm only dates and title. Confirm a professional license at the issuing state board’s free public lookup, which is the primary source. Treat references as leads, not proof, and watch for a friend posing as a manager. One line matters above all the rest: if you are making a formal employment, tenant, or credit decision, that is governed by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act and must run through a consumer reporting agency with the person’s written consent. General public-records due diligence on a vendor, partner, or contractor is a different thing, and that is the lawful work People Locator Skip Tracing does, not a consumer report and not for FCRA-covered hiring.
Watch: Catching a Resume Lie
How to check each claim against the source that issued it.
Watch Overview
Why a Resume Is a Claim, Not a Record
The whole method follows from one shift in how you read it.
Almost everyone reads a resume as a summary of facts. It is closer to a sales document. Every line was written by the person it describes, with full knowledge of what they wanted you to conclude and no requirement to prove a word of it. That is not cynicism; it is simply the structure of the thing. The good news is that most of the important claims on a resume point back to an institution that keeps the real record: a university registrar holds the degree, a state licensing board holds the license, a former employer’s payroll system holds the dates of employment, a court holds any judgment or conviction. Verification is the act of leaving the document and asking that institution directly. When the resume and the source agree, you have confidence. When they disagree, you have your answer.
The fabrications worth catching are rarely subtle. Surveys of professional screeners find that the overwhelming majority eventually uncover a misrepresentation on an application, and that the single most common one is the educational claim, the degree that was never finished, the school that was never attended, or the credential bought from an operation that is not a real school at all. People stretch the truth because it works often enough to be worth the risk: a degree or a fancier title can move a candidate past a filter or up a pay band. So you do not need to be paranoid about every line. You need to know which claims matter for your decision and how to check each of them at the source. The rest of this guide is exactly that, claim by claim, plus the legal line that decides which rules you have to follow.
Verify the Degree
The most-faked claim, and the easiest to check at the source.
Start with the school, not the diploma. Anyone can frame a printed certificate. The record that matters lives with the issuing institution’s registrar or office of the records, and most schools will confirm attendance dates and whether a degree was conferred, often through a quick call or a written request. In the United States, a great deal of this is centralized: the National Student Clearinghouse provides degree and enrollment verification for most colleges and universities, and many institutions route verification requests there directly. What you are confirming is narrow and factual: did this person attend, for what span, and did they actually earn the degree they listed, in the field and at the level they claimed. A common and quiet lie is the person who attended but never graduated, then lists the degree anyway. The Clearinghouse or the registrar settles it.
Then confirm the school itself is real. This is the step most people skip, and it is where the cleverest resume fraud hides. A degree only means something if it comes from an accredited institution, and you can check accreditation through the U.S. Department of Education’s database of accredited postsecondary institutions and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. If the “university” is not in those databases, or the only accreditation it cites is from an agency that itself is not recognized, treat the credential as worthless no matter how official the diploma looks. For the deeper context on what schools, dates, and credentials actually surface and how, our guide to what shows up on a background check covers how education verification fits the larger picture.
How to Spot a Diploma Mill
An unaccredited “school” that sells a real-looking degree. Here are the tells.
A Degree for a Flat Fee
You pay a lump sum, sometimes a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and a degree arrives with little or no real coursework.
Credit for “Life Experience”
The school awards a full degree based on prior work or “life experience” rather than completed, graded study.
An Improbably Fast Finish
A bachelor’s or master’s “earned” in weeks or a few months. Real accredited programs do not work that way.
A Name That Mimics a Real School
The institution’s name closely echoes a famous university, banking on a quick glance not catching the difference.
Fake or Unrecognized Accreditation
It claims accreditation, but from a body that is not recognized by the Department of Education or the accreditation council.
No Real Campus or Faculty
No verifiable physical location, no named faculty, no published academic standards, and a pushy admissions sales process.
Verify Employment Dates and Titles
Where the gaps and the inflated titles live.
Employment history is the second place fabrication clusters, and the lies here are usually about three things: the dates, the title, and whether the job existed at all. People paper over an employment gap by stretching the end date of an old role, they upgrade a coordinator to a manager or a manager to a director, and occasionally they invent an employer entirely or list a company that has since folded so it cannot answer the phone. The way to test all three is the same: call the former employer’s official human-resources or verification line, the one published on the company’s real website, not a cell number the candidate handed you. Be aware of the modern reality of employment verification. Many larger employers, on the advice of their lawyers, will confirm only the dates of employment and the job title held, and decline to discuss performance or rehire eligibility. That narrow confirmation is still enormously useful, because dates and title are exactly what gets inflated.
Watch the seams between jobs. A resume that runs in tidy whole years with no months is often hiding the precise gaps that months would reveal, so ask for month-level dates and compare them. If a claimed employer cannot be found in any public business registry and has no real footprint, that is a flag worth pulling on, and lawful people-search and public-records research can help confirm whether a company or a person genuinely exists where the resume says they do. Treat a verified gap calmly; gaps are normal and often have honest explanations. What you are testing is not whether the person had a perfect career, but whether they told you the truth about it.
Verify a Professional License
For regulated roles, the primary source is free and public.
If the resume claims a regulated credential, a nursing or medical license, a contractor’s or electrician’s license, a CPA, an attorney’s bar admission, a real-estate or insurance license, you are in luck, because these are among the easiest claims to verify and the verification is free. Licenses are issued and tracked by a government board, and almost every board publishes an online license-lookup tool that is the primary source: the actual record of whether the license exists, whose name it is under, whether it is active or expired, and whether it carries any public discipline. Search by the person’s name and the issuing state. The board’s own site is the record you want; a screenshot of a license the candidate sends you is not, because it is trivial to alter.
Two cautions. First, license requirements are state-specific, so confirm the credential in the state where the person will actually practice or work, not just the state where they say they were first licensed. Second, an expired or suspended license is its own kind of resume lie when it is presented as current; read the status field carefully, not just the license number. If you are not sure which agency regulates a given profession, the federal portal at USA.gov points to the right state agencies and licensing boards, which makes finding the correct board’s lookup tool straightforward.
The Line That Matters Most: The FCRA
Which lane you are in decides which rules apply. Get this right before anything else.
Everything above can be done as ordinary, lawful due diligence, but there is one situation where a separate and stricter body of federal law takes over, and it is essential to know whether you are in it. If you are an employer making a hiring, promotion, or retention decision, or a landlord screening a tenant, or anyone making a decision based on a person’s creditworthiness, and you have someone else assemble a report on that person for you to make that decision, that report is a consumer report and the work is governed by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act. Under the FCRA, that kind of background check has to be performed by a consumer reporting agency, the person being checked must receive a clear written disclosure and give written consent before the report is pulled, and if you take an adverse action based on it, such as not hiring them, you must follow a specific notice process that lets them see and dispute the report.
This is the boundary People Locator Skip Tracing holds firmly. We are a skip-tracing and public-records research firm. We are not a consumer reporting agency, our research is not a consumer report, and it may not be used to make FCRA-covered decisions about employment, tenancy, or credit. When you need a formal employment background check, the right move is a proper FCRA-compliant provider with the candidate’s consent, and our guides to running a background check the right way and the different types of background checks walk through how that process is supposed to work. Where we fit is the other lane entirely: general due diligence on a business, a vendor, a potential partner, a contractor, or someone in your personal life, using public records for a lawful, permissible purpose. Same verification mindset, different legal framework, and the difference is not a technicality.
Verifying It Yourself vs. What We Add
Most claims you can check alone. Here is where research help earns its place.
| Claim | Check It Yourself | Where Research Adds Depth |
|---|---|---|
| Degree | Registrar or National Student Clearinghouse; confirm accreditation in the federal database. | Untangling name changes, foreign schools, and degrees from defunct or mill institutions. |
| Employment Dates | Call the employer’s official HR or verification line for dates and title. | Confirming a claimed employer exists and tracing a company that has dissolved or rebranded. |
| Professional License | The issuing state board’s free public license-lookup tool. | Cross-state checks and tying a license to the right person when names are common. |
| Identity and Aliases | Match the legal name and basic identifiers across what you already hold. | Surfacing prior names, aliases, and addresses that connect the record across sources. |
| References | Call the reference using a number you found independently, not one supplied. | Confirming a “manager” is a real former supervisor and not a friend posing as one. |
| Lawful Due Diligence Our Team | Time-consuming and scattered across many sources. | One organized, permissible-purpose public-records report on a vendor or partner, not for FCRA hiring. |
The honest summary: most single claims, you can and should verify yourself with a phone call or a free database lookup, and you do not need anyone’s help to do it. Where lawful research earns its keep is when the identifiers do not line up cleanly, when a company or school is hard to pin down, or when you need the picture pulled together into one defensible file for a legitimate purpose that is not an FCRA-covered hiring, tenant, or credit decision.
A Verification Workflow
Run the claims in order, from easiest source to hardest.
List the Load-Bearing Claims
Pull out the lines your decision actually rests on: the degree, the key dates, the title, the license. Ignore the adjectives and verify the facts.
Hit the Free Primary Sources
Run the license lookup and the accreditation database first. They are free, fast, and definitive, and they catch the boldest lies in minutes.
Confirm Degree and Employment
Verify the degree through the registrar or Clearinghouse, then confirm employment dates and title through each employer’s official verification line.
Decide Your Lane, Then Act
If this is an employment, tenant, or credit decision, route it through an FCRA-compliant agency with consent. If it is general due diligence, document what you found and proceed lawfully.
Who Needs to Verify a Resume
The same method serves very different situations.
Small Business Owners
Vetting a contractor or partner
Families
Checking a nanny or caregiver
Investors
Confirming a founder’s record
Boards
Due diligence on a candidate
Professionals
Verifying a counterpart’s claims
Anyone Vetting
A vendor, date, or partner
Whatever the situation, the discipline is identical: separate the claim from the record, then go to the record. For a person you cannot fully pin down, lawful skip tracing connects names, prior addresses, and identifiers across public records so you can be sure the credentials you are verifying belong to the person in front of you. If the trail runs into a court file or a criminal-history question, our guides to finding someone’s court records and researching a person’s criminal history cover those public records, again, as general information and outside any FCRA-covered hiring decision.
Be Honest About the Limits
Verification answers some questions cleanly and others not at all.
Verification is powerful, but it is not omniscient, and pretending otherwise leads people astray. Some claims have a clean primary source and resolve to a yes or no: a license exists or it does not, a degree was conferred or it was not. Others are softer. A former employer that confirms only dates and title will tell you nothing about whether the person was good at the job, and a glowing self-described “reference” may simply be a friend with a script. Skills and accomplishments, the “increased revenue by a third” line, are often the hardest to test and the easiest to inflate, which is why a working interview or a practical exercise frequently reveals more than any document. And public records have real gaps: records can be incomplete, names get confused, and an absence of a record is not always proof that nothing happened.
The mature posture is to treat each verified fact as exactly what it is, no more. A confirmed lie about a degree or a license is a serious, decision-changing fact. An unverifiable soft claim is a prompt to test the skill directly, not to assume the worst. And whenever the decision is a formal one about employment, housing, or credit, the FCRA framework is not optional, so let a proper consumer reporting agency do that work with consent. Used this way, verification protects you from genuine fraud without turning honest gaps and ordinary imperfections into something they are not. Our guide to lawful criminal background research covers a related public-records question in the same general-information spirit.
Our Commitment
We verify lawfully and we stay in our lane. We are not a consumer reporting agency, our research is not a consumer report, and it is not for FCRA-covered employment, tenant, or credit decisions. What we do is honest, permissible-purpose public-records research and skip tracing, telling you plainly what the records can and cannot show. Doing this work the right way since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the fastest way to find out if someone lied on their resume?
Start with the free primary sources. Run the person’s professional license through the issuing state board’s online lookup and check their school’s accreditation in the U.S. Department of Education database. Both are free, take minutes, and catch the boldest lies first. Then confirm the degree with the registrar or the National Student Clearinghouse and confirm employment dates and title through each employer’s official verification line.
How do I verify someone’s college degree?
Go to the source, not the diploma. Contact the school’s registrar or use the National Student Clearinghouse, which handles degree and enrollment verification for most U.S. colleges, to confirm whether the person attended and actually earned the degree. Then confirm the school itself is genuinely accredited through the federal accreditation database, since a diploma mill can produce an official-looking degree that means nothing.
What is a diploma mill and how do I spot one?
A diploma mill is an unaccredited operation that sells a degree for a flat fee with little or no real coursework. The tells include a degree awarded for “life experience,” an improbably fast finish, a name that mimics a famous university, no verifiable campus or faculty, and accreditation from a body that is not recognized by the Department of Education. If the school is not in the federal accreditation database, treat the credential as worthless.
Can I confirm someone’s employment dates and job title?
Yes. Call the former employer’s official human-resources or verification line, the one on the company’s real website, and ask them to confirm the dates of employment and the title held. Many larger employers confirm only dates and title and will not discuss performance, but that is exactly the information people inflate, so the confirmation is still very valuable. Ask for month-level dates to expose any gaps a year-only resume is hiding.
How do I check a professional license?
Use the issuing state board’s public license-lookup tool, which is the primary source and is free. Search by the person’s name and the state, then read the status field, not just the license number, to confirm whether the license is active, expired, or disciplined. Verify the credential in the state where the person will actually work, because licensing is state-specific. USA.gov can point you to the correct state agency or board.
Is it legal to verify what someone put on their resume?
Checking publicly available primary sources, a license lookup, an accreditation database, an employer’s verification line, is ordinary lawful due diligence. The important distinction is the Fair Credit Reporting Act: if you are making a formal employment, tenant, or credit decision and have a report assembled for that purpose, federal law requires that it go through a consumer reporting agency with the person’s written disclosure and consent. Casual self-verification and formal FCRA-covered screening are not the same thing.
Is People Locator Skip Tracing a background-check service for hiring?
No. We are a skip-tracing and public-records research firm, not a consumer reporting agency. Our research is not a consumer report and may not be used for FCRA-covered decisions about employment, tenancy, or credit. For a formal hiring background check, use an FCRA-compliant provider with the candidate’s consent. We help with general, permissible-purpose due diligence on vendors, partners, contractors, and people in your personal life.
What if I cannot verify a claim at all?
Treat an unverifiable soft claim differently from a confirmed lie. A confirmed false degree or license is a serious, decision-changing fact. An unverifiable accomplishment, like a vague revenue figure, is a prompt to test the skill directly through a working interview rather than to assume the worst. Public records can be incomplete, and an absence of a record is not always proof that nothing happened, so weigh each result for exactly what it is.
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