Meet Anthony Wood, the certificate mill operator out of the UK who operates Management Certification Ltd. (MCERT). The UK website for MCERT claims to have certified companies like Ramada, Toyota, Suzuki and the global consulting firm Deloitte, all while holding fake accreditations from two made-up bodies, United Accreditation Service (UAS) and the International Management Accreditation Board (IMAB).
While calling MCERT a “trusted partner,” — so, for sure, his claims must be true, right? — Wood sells both consulting and certification for the cheap price of only£750 ($986). He’ll hand you a bunch of bad template documents and then a “fully accredited” certificate in only seven days.
The problem is, UK business filings show MCERT as “dormant” since 2016. This means the company has had no reportable revenue in all those years. The most recent filing from Wood, as of April 2024, looks like this:
You’d think with clients like that, Wood would be making some money.
Wood also claims a number of five-star reviews on Google, but these appear to come largely out of Romania. Some of them are current, too, creating a tax problem for Wood. His official filings with the UK government claim no revenue, and yet his Google reviews claim he was selling services (to Romanians, anyway) as of just a few months ago.
Clicking down that rabbithole, one finds that the real location for MCERT is in Romania, after all, and they even have their own website in that country. So whether Anthony Wood is (a) a fake name, (b) a Romanian posing as a Brit, or (c) a UK scammer who agreed to help the Romanians rip off Brits… none of those are good options.
No matter how you look at it, all of this is fraud, pure and simple. But governments have refused ot make the exploding certificate mill industry illegal, so scammers thrive.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
