Indian Scam No. 9,999: CBs Now Pretending to be Accreditation Bodies

[For updates, scroll to bottom.]

If the sun has risen somewhere on the planet, you know that it means the plucky ISO experts in India have cooked up yet another way to rip off people. Now comes evidence that an ISO certification body has issued at least one ISO 17025 certificate; the problem is that only accreditation bodies can issue those, and CBs cannot.

“LMS Certificate Ltd.” issued an ISO 17025 certificate to Pakistani company AR Voltcal Solutions. The certificate even includes the logos of its accreditation body, EGAC, and the IAF (now rebranded as “Global ACI.”)

The certificate issued to AR Voltac is listed on the LMS website:

The problem, of course, is that certification bodies don’t issue ISO 17025 certificates; accreditation bodies do. So LMS cannot issue them at all.

Now, as with all things Indian in the ISO world, things get complicated and very shady, very fast.

Scammers Scamming Scammers?

After my initial report, I filed a complaint with LMS Certifications. This is a company which, as Indian CBs tend to do, uses a variety of alternate names, like LMS Certificate Limited, LMS Certification, LMS Certifications Pvt. Ltd, LMS Assessment Management Services, LMS Certifications FZE, and Linear Management Systems. They are all owned by a fairly notorious figure in Indian ISO circles, Dr. Pushpendr Singh. I can’t tell you just how many scam reports I have received about Singh, but he generally covers his tracks just enough to make the reports fizzle out quickly. Even he can’t spell his own name consistently; Singh has a second LinkedIn account under the name Pushpender Singh, and later sent me an email signed Pushpendra. I suppose we can chalk that up to regional spellings?

What is known is that Singh is behind the (largely fake) accreditation body, Pennsylvania Accreditation Centre (PAC), which pretends to be a US body, but — like IAS and UAF before it — is actually run out of India. To date, PAC has not gotten into the IAF fold, but that is likely to happen, since no one cares about rules anymore. (The Indians apparently didn’t know that, in the US, it’s spelled “center,” not “centre.”)

PAC is allegedly applying for full IAF (Global ACI) membership, but so far they haven’t signed Singh up.

One of PAC’s alleged “accredited” CBs is Staunchly Management and System Services, for which Pushpendr Singh — and you saw this coming — acts as a director. Another listed director for Staunchly is Luxmi Singh, who is also the Executive Director for PAC. And PAC-accredited body A-Mark Ratings Ltd. also has Singh listed as a Director.

So, yes, Singh created an AB to accredit his own CBs, and EGAC is cool with that.

Singh is listed as a director of at least seventeen companies in India, including Lei System & Registry Services, Integral Certification and ICRS Management Systems. So far, those don’t appear to claim accreditation, whether fake or otherwise.

After the first posting of this article just two days ago, Singh wrote me with a quasi-cease-and-desist, claiming that the fake certificate was issued by some other Indian scammer who was trying to discredit his company. His evidence is that the fake cert was issued by a company using the web URL “lmscerts.com” and his company, the real one, uses “lmscert.com.”

I then checked and, sure enough, the official LMS site does not list the cert for AR Voltcal in its registry.

At first blush, it does appear someone stole the LMS website, made minor changes, and is scamming using the LMS name. But it’s not that simple.

Follow the Money

An analysis of the allegedly fake site, lmscerts.com, shows it was created using a website cloning app, but all the way back in 2024. However, most of the contact and email links resolve to Singh’s real company at lmscert.com, so Singh has been — coincidentally — benefiting from the allegedly “fake” site for at least two years.

You’d think if someone set up a fake site, they’d want all the sales leads to go to them, not the owner of the site they stole. Why steal a website if you only intend on sending all the leads to the victim?

Singh then told me he had launched a probe into LMS, implying this had been done previously:

We are currently investigating this matter and are taking appropriate legal and regulatory action against the persons/entities responsible for creating, operating, copying, forging or disseminating such information. At this stage, we are also working to identify the actual individuals behind the fraudulent website and related activities, and therefore we do not wish to speculate publicly about their identity.

Our preliminary assessment indicates that information from such an unauthorized website may have been relied upon or associated with LMS Certifications. If so, this could have resulted in inaccurate conclusions regarding our organization, its activities and its management.

When I asked for proof, he sent me some PDFs of filings he made with the Indian cybercrime division, and they revealed a troubling fact: he had only filed them earlier today (31 August), meaning after my original reporting. So, only after our reporting did Singh take action against the alleged scammers, and only after two years of them pumping leads his way.

We’re supposed to believe that to be true. In my First Amendment, Constitutionally-protected opinion, I don’t believe it for a minute. It would have been very easy for Singh to have filed a complaint against his own fake website so he can now claim he’s doing something about it, two years late.

A WHOIS report claims the lmscerts.com website was registered by one “Naveed Ul Qamar Hussain” but there’s no evidence this is a real person. I am still checking on that. That report says the URL was registered in April 2025, so it’s not clear what was done with the site between the time it was cloned (in 2024) and registered (in 2025.)

In his email, mind you, Singh does not challenge the rest of the reporting — such as his name appearing in both PAC and the bodies it claims to accredit — so presumably he has no defense for that.

EGAC to the Rescue… Not

The real LMS is actually accredited by EGAC, the Egyptian accreditation body, but not for the issuance of ISO 17025 certificates. Again, this is because LMS is a CB, not an AB, and only ABs can issue those. In fact, EGAC itself is one of the ABs that does this, meaning EGAC’s client is poaching their own client base.

EGAC is famously corrupt, though, and has a history of ignoring outright fraud by its accredited CB clients, so it remains uncertain if they even care about any of this.

I sent a complaint to LMS and copied EGAC and Global ACI, but I don’t expect much response. The Global ACI has abandoned its oversight duties entirely, and the CBs and ABs know it. They can do whatever they want now, and so long as governments don’t hold them accountable under anti-fraud laws, there is not much anyone can do about it.

And Singh responded to the publication of this report in just hours, and yet still has not responded to the formal complaint. In his response to me, he hints he might have to take legal action against me for defamation, so it shows where his priorities lie: not in the fact that someone (according to him) has been stealing his brand for at least two years, but that it was reported by me for a few hours.

No matter what, EGAC is in the soup: per their own accreditation to ISO 17011, they are required to take some kind of action — including legal action — against the (fake?) body using their mark and logo improperly. I don’t think we should hold our breath.

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UPDATE 31 August 2026: The article was nearly entirely rewritten to reflect the latest information and details of Singh’s responses.

I will update as this develops.