Datacenter CEO alleged to have faked Tier 4 cert to snag $10.7M SEC deal, DoJ claims
It's one thing to stretch the truth in your marketing material, but allegedly lying about your datacenter's qualities to lure the Securities and Exchange Commission as a customer is a whole other matter.
Deepak Jain, identified as the CEO of a Maryland IT services firm that goes unnamed in a grand jury indictment [PDF] made public on Wednesday, has been charged with six counts of major fraud and one count of making false statements after allegedly telling the Commission (SEC) that his firm's datacenter in Beltsville, MD, had secured the "Tier 4" certification required for a to qualify for an SEC colocation contract.
Such certifications are offerd by The Uptime Institute, which defines Tier 4 facilities as offering expected uptime of 99.995 percent thanks to the presence of various resilience measures. Jain's unnamed firm allegedly provided fraudulent certification documents to the SEC in 2011 during contract negotiations, leading to it landing the deal.
But the certifier – an entity called Uptime Council – didn't exist at all. The DoJ alleges it was created by Jain to falsely certify his business as a Tier 4 datacenter operator, and that the fib helped him and several unnamed co-conspirators to cash in.
