I can barely keep up with the scams coming out of the United Accreditation Foundation (UAF), the scammer accreditation body that managed to get full international recognition and IAF membership after they bribed paid IAF regional body APAC’s head, Graeme Drake.

UAF is now being investigated for criminal tax fraud, after claiming for nearly a decade that they are a US not-for-profit, but never having filed an actual tax return as a 501(c)(3) in the US. APAC’s Drake is refusing to investigate, because he has a part of their fraudulent funds in his pocket, and the IAF’s Victor Gandy thinks that some random internal procedure trumps US law, so he doesn’t have to investigate it either.

Here is Gandy simultaneously saying he takes complaints seriously, and then invoking “PR1” to explain why he’s NOT processing the complaint and handing it over to Drake:

But here’s an entirely new UAF scam for you. A while back, an Indian scammer using the name “Sumeet Kale” (among others) ran a certificate mill named BSQR out of India, and was accredited by the International Accreditation Service (IAS — and yes, I know all these abbreviations look alike. The organizations do this intentionally so you will confuse them with each other.) The IAS ignored Kale’s fake certificates for a while, but they finally had it and withdrew his accreditation.

Here is one of Kale’s fake AS9100 certs, issued under an alternate (and equally fake) accreditation body, “USAC”:

Now look at the BQSR website, and note the Wyoming address, because that comes back later:

Left without any formal accreditation, Kale had to get creative. So he reached out to Parveen Sadana, the Indian scammer who ran a number of fake certificate mills in India and then set up the fake accreditation body UAF. He got a pal, Dr. Tejwant Chandi, to use his house as the official “US office” for UAF, and then had Chandi’s son use a fake name so they could pretend to have staff. Sadana applied for IAF membership through APAC, and paid Drake some money to ignore all the complaints we were filing alleging fraud. Drake approved UAF and they became an official IAF members, through APAC.

So Kale immediately started issuing fake certificates under BQSR, but now they are with the UAF logo. Not stopping there, Kale also got another one of his fake certificate mills, Americo Quality Systems Registech (or something like that), accredited by UAF. But to do that, he had to use an alternate spelling of his name to make it appear he was totally a different person. The UAF and Sadana ignored that part since Kale paid them off, too.

Drake gets a percentage of that money, so APAC’s not investigating it, either.

Here are the two official listings for Kale’s certificate mills on the UAF website. For BQSR he used the name “Sumeet Kale,” and for Americo he used “Sumit Kale.” Both have the same Wyoming address, though.

Meanwhile, Kale’s LinkedIn profile shows he has also run another fake mill called “ISO Certification Group.” I’m not sure what happened to that one.

The Americo website now boasts a sample certificate using the full UAF/IAF logo, too, even Kale issues fake AS9100 certificates to aircraft manufacturing companies, which could get people killed.

Meanwhile, it gets even more complicated as Kale pumps out fake companies and websites like snakes take shits. He runs another fake mill, also called “AQSR,” but bearing the name “American Quality Standards Registrar” in the website logo. The metadata for the site uses the name “Americo,” though, as does their official “procedures” page.

There’s no end to the depravity of UAF’s Sadana and APAC’s Drake. We have reported how the UAF accredited a fake test lab from Turkey that did fake tests on medical exam gloves, potentially risking the lives of doctors and patients alike. Drake buried that complaint while he was approving UAF for APAC membership.

So, they are not really interested in whether or not people die from defective products issued under the UAF and IAF logos. (Note that Drake’s APAC logo never appears on any of these Indian mill certificates.) But the dead people might care.

I used to say it was metaphorically criminal that the IAF allows APAC to get away with granting membership to bodies that everyone else on the planet has rejected. I may be ready to go further and say it is literally criminal. APAC is claiming to do ISO 17011 peer evaluations to members. That cannot be possible in UAF’s case. There is no way that UAF is anywhere near compliant to 170911, and yet Drake ignores it. This appears to me to be overt fraud.

Let me be clear: people are going to die from the products put out by companies with fake quality certificates. Nobody in authority cares, though. Not IAF’s Victor Gandy, not UAF’s Parveen Sadana, not APAC’s Graeme Drake, and certainly not the scammer Sumit Kale. The entire accreditation scheme is one giant mill operation now.

But what will anyone do about it? The Australian government has said it won’t investigate APAC or Drake. Certainly, the Indian government is not going to suddenly care about changing an entire culture, and begin to regulate scams. IAF won’t step in, because Gandy literally takes nearly half of the IAF’s annual income for himself, and isn’t about to end that gravy train.

What a shitshow.

 

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