the badge lied

If you've been to Gurugram, you've seen 32nd Avenue, the European-style mall with cafes and boutiques.

Dhruv Sharma built that.

He founded GuestHouser in 2014. Forbes called it "India's Airbnb" and he made it to the 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2018.

Three weeks ago, he was arrested for selling the same commercial floor to 25 different buyers. Many doctors and retirees lost their life savings.

During the same week in New York. Gökçe Güven, another 30 Under 30 from the 2025 list was charged with fraud.

Forbes even published its own "Hall of Shame" in 2023.

Forbes tried to identify talent and ended up validating fraud instead.

Forbes gets over 100,000 nominations annually. 

You can nominate yourself, self-report metrics and not go through verification until much later.

Charlie Javice made the Forbes list in 2019 for Frank, a student aid app.
She had the pedigree as a Wharton graduate and got good press coverage. 

By 2021, she was pitching to JPMorgan, claiming Frank had over 4 million users. 

The real number was not even 10% of it.

JPMorgan put 350 people on due diligence, and Javice bribed one of the data scientists $18,000 to fake the 4.25 million records. 

They eventually bought the company for $175 million. 

After the deal, they sent a test email to Frank's "4.25 million users”, and only 10 people signed up.

Their executive testified she "100% trusted" Javice.

The judge gave her a 12-year sentence.

Forbes listed her based on self-reported numbers, VCs funded and JPMorgan bought her company.

Each layer assumed someone else had verified.

Last week, someone posted a rate card on X for a "30 Under 30" nomination. 

The full package costs about ₹25,000-₹30,000 and in return, you get a certificate, magazine coverage, and a social media post.

If JPMorgan with 350 people on due diligence can get fooled, what chance do the rest of us have?

After the Gurugram scam, I looked at India's startup ecosystem.

Indian statups raised $11 billion in startup funding in 2025.
Down 17% from 2024.

And seed round funding dropped by 30% to $1.1 billion.

When everyone claims "Forbes-featured" or "AI-powered," investors can't separate signal from noise.

So they retreat to the one thing they can verify: pedigree.

IIT graduates founded just 6.3% of India's tech startups between 2015-2025. Yet they captured 49% of all equity funding.

Today over 50% of India's 100 unicorns have IIT founders. IIT Delhi alone produced the founders of 28 unicorns.

Researchers analysed 30,000 people across 26 countries and found that credentials beat skills every time. 

When you can't verify competence, you fall back on what you can verify.

This isn't unique to India. 

Harvard tracked 26 million job postings globally and found the same pattern. 

Jobs that never needed degrees now demand them, and those that needed bachelor's degrees now want master's degrees.

The work didn't change, but everyone has degrees now.

The same inflation happened with prestige lists.

When Forbes runs 20 regional "30 Under 30" lists across categories, when you can buy your way onto a list for ₹30,000, the signal dilutes to nothing.

Indian investors retreat to the next layer of credentials. Only backing IIT founders, Y Combinator alumni or companies Sequoia already vetted.

The credential inflation that caused the problem becomes the solution.

The paradox isn't that prestige lists are broken.

Journalists were never meant to verify competence. They were meant to identify interesting stories, and are good at it.

The problem is we plugged their output into a system that treats "interesting" as a proxy for "trustworthy."

Each layer creates the evidence the next layer relies on.

The system designed to reduce risk manufactures it instead.

Due diligence didn't fail at JPMorgan because 350 people were incompetent. 

By the time they got in the room, at least three layers of credibility had already validated the story.

The same Forbes list gave us Zuckerberg and Malala. but it also gave us SBF and Martin Shkreli.

In the early stages, both profiles look identical on paper. And the system isn’t built to tell the difference.

The ₹500 crore Gurugram scam is what happens when you build an economy on badges instead of fundamentals.

I stopped looking at badges.

I ask people to walk me through how they built something, show me the code they wrote and explain their thought process.

Competence builds long-term relationships.
Frauds burn through people.

I now ask ‘what failed before this succeeded’, and ‘what specifically changed between the failure and the win.’

Build something people can see. Make your work public.

And let your output speak louder than your resume.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. What credential did you once trust that you now question? Hit reply and tell me.
I read every email.