I was not suspicious at first. I was just paying attention. But by week three, I had a list of small, specific things Marcus had said that did not match his resume. He claimed to have led a team of forty at McKinsey — but when I asked him what his engagement staffing ratios had been, he gave me an answer that does not exist at McKinsey. He talked about his Stanford experience using language that did not match any Stanford course I had heard about from the four Stanford MBAs I personally knew. He told a story, in a leadership offsite, about "that time our Strat professor made us role-play a hostile board," and when I asked him which professor, he said a name I could not find on Stanford's faculty listing. By week five, I was checking alumni records. I called Stanford's alumni office and pretended to be an HR verifier. They had no record of Marcus Cole in the class he claimed. I tried three variations of his name. Nothing.