Posted By Gary Malone
Yesterday when undertaking a site safety inspection as normal i take a random sample of plant ops and ask to view their cpcs cards.

Long Story short One was a High Quality Fake (Verified by telephoning CITB CPCS) I have seen many cards and only a few tell tale signs were apparent.

1. The authenticity telephone number was different the norm begins with 0870 or the older on 01485 this was 01606.

2. The plant categories were slightly wrong the above and below 5t cat for a 360 excavator is very old where as this card was almost new and forklift normally would state rough terrain telescopic 7m i think.

3. The hologram whilst there looks significantly different upon CLOSE inspection.

The offender was a eastern european who showed no remorse embarressment anything, I was shocked he had been sacked on the spot by his employer a LARGE Player in the Construction industry. He would not leave site and waited for 5 hours on his lift home. (I double and treble checked to ensure that I was correct)

Always phone 08704-1777274 CPCS if in doubt.

Needless to say changes are being made to the current induction system, but I could not blame anyone for missing as the card was almost 99% indistinguishable from the real thing

Posted By Gary Malone
No the Police or Immigration were not called, my opinion was the should have been, at the time I never even thought of immigration, we were then looking into the other employees of this Big PLC Contractor, but the card will be returned to CITB whom may well call the police, as the offender was a sub-contractor and I was acting for the Principal Contractor the PC have put the onus onto the employer.
This all happened on Friday afternoon so, I'm sure the backlash will come on Monday.

I certainly have heard of Fake cards, though not much is said about them and as I state it is very hard to distinguish they are very good quality, I rang CITB as there were minor niggles to me on his card.