Is Accredited finance Courses UK a scam?

I was contacted by Prestige Recruitment.
who told me I needed to buy an expensive course from Accredited Finance Courses in order to get a job interview. This doesn’t feel right to me, so I’m hoping someone here can provide some clarity. It’s my first time posting on The Student Room, and I’m also new to the UK, so I’m not sure if this is normal practice. Any advice would be really helpful — the course is very expensive, and I don’t have much money. It feels like a scam, but I’m not completely sure.

Reply 1

Llamas_and_Cake

Original post

by Kiran2999292

I was contacted by Prestige Recruitment.
who told me I needed to buy an expensive course from Accredited Finance Courses
in order to get a job interview. This doesn’t feel right to me, so I’m hoping someone here can provide some clarity. It’s my first time posting on The Student Room, and I’m also new to the UK, so I’m not sure if this is normal practice. Any advice would be really helpful — the course is very expensive, and I don’t have much money. It feels like a scam, but I’m not completely sure.

Not regular at all. Good on you for checking. You’ve probably saved yourself a lot of hassle.

As a rule, anyone who wants to make you pay money for a job interview is a scammer. Genuine recruitment agencies do not search out people who aren’t qualified for a job and then tell them how to get qualified. That’s just not how it works.

Plus, if the job was real, it would be gone long before you finished your training. There is also no legitimate reason why an employer would insist on a course from a specific training provider – if you have the right qualification it shouldn’t matter where you got it from. Lots of red flags there.

…which leads me on to the ‘accreditation’. The site you have mentioned does not offer regulated qualifications that carry transferable credit. I won’t bore you with the way accreditation/regulation works, but I guess you could call these ‘personal interest’ courses. Being ‘accredited’ by the ‘CPD Certification Service’ doesn’t really mean anything. That doesn’t mean they’re automatically scams, but you should be aware of what you’re getting: i.e. not a credit-bearing qualification.

Also, the site has existed for less than a year and the courses that they have had ‘approved’ have existed for somewhere in between two months and two weeks. If there is really an employer out there who is desperate for graduates of a non-qualification that has existed for a fortnight then I will eat several hats.

Reply 2

Kiran2999292

Thanks — turns out everything you said was right. I’ve decided to go with the CISI. Thanks very much! There’s a great deal of information online about them now, with many recruitment companies linked to their qualifications.https://www.trustpilot.com/review/prestigerecruitmentltd.co.uk https://accreditedfinancecourses.co.uk/ Thank you for your response and for clearing things up.

(edited 1 month ago)

Reply 3

Llamas_and_Cake

Glad the response was useful.

I did a bit of further digging after my post. The website uses several logos of genuine and reputable institutions (actually including CISI) in a list of what they call their ‘key supporters’. So I emailed each of them to ask what their relationship with Accredited-Finance-Courses was and whether they endorsed their qualifications. Not all of them got back to me, but of the ones that did, none of them had ever heard of the website before and stated that they had no relationship whatsoever with this provider.

Good luck with your course (and career), and I’m glad you avoided an expensive mistake.