Like ‘Suits’ Meets ‘Mad Men’ But With Fraud Charges Because It’s Real Life

If you’ve ever watched Suits and thought, “I should’ve faked my way into this soul-sucking lawyer gig and avoided all the crushing law school debt,” rest assured that, no, you should not have. If you base your life on Suits, you literally have a better chance of becoming a British royal than having a successful legal career, an absolutely insane yet nonetheless accurate statement. Consider the plight of Aditya Rai who took that fake lawyer inspiration, ran with it, and ended up sprinting headlong into fraud charges.

As Legal Cheek explains, Rai, a 43-year-old who substituted basic cable as a life coach, decided that formal legal education and professional accreditation were merely advisory. I guess we should just be thankful that he didn’t take his cues from Wings. Sorry, that’s a dated reference to when cable showed underappreciated sitcoms… today, USA just shows 23-hour blocs of SVU and NCIS. Cruising on forged academic certificates and a fake resume, Rai secured not one, not two, but three short-term legal roles at law firms in Gloucestershire and Bristol.

His work only netted him around £10,000, which could hardly sustain nine seasons of programming, making his deception hardly a Suits and more of a mere Suits: LA.

Unwilling to stop at faking a law degree, Rai also pulled a Dick Whitman/Don Draper, adopting a full second identity with a UK driver’s license under the name “Ali Ryan” and a revised birth date. He got a couple of bank accounts under that name. There was also a false Irish driver’s license… because why let Brexit limit your EU options?

Rai ultimately admitted three counts of fraud by “false representation, possessing/controlling false identity documents with intent and using a false instrument with intent it be accepted as genuine,” according to Legal Cheek… along with the forgery charge for that Irish license.

His Honour Judge Ian Lawrie KC said that Rai had “been a busy boy in terms of dishonesty” and “divulged in a rather elaborate sequence of steps to defraud people of his identity”.

At a sentencing hearing on 30 April, Judge Lawrie handed down a 20-month prison sentence, suspended for two years. Rai was also ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid work.

Rai’s defense focused on the hardship of the COVID lockdown leaving Rai without financial support and limited legitimate means to find any. Not that this is a justification for fraud, but it is a topic that deserves more attention. While the legal industry thrived in the work-from-home reality — until law firms decided to start stripping it away on a moment’s notice — a lot of other jobs weren’t as lucky. And if you found yourself out of work in a profession that can’t do everything over Zoom, a level of desperation can set in.

The violent thrust of American politics over the last half century hyped “up from their bootstraps” mythologies as cover to slash and burn the social safety net. Lately, this has metastasized into attacks on elite educational institutions. Elite private schools bring a lot of ugly baggage to the table, but they were once the “goal” for an upwardly striving good student. Getting into Harvard against all odds — as opposed to because your family joined the right country club — made for a neatly packaged success story. Now colleges are derided as at best the antithesis of this warmed over Horatio Alger narrative and at worst a nefarious entity disrupting the natural order by bestowing success on the “wrong kind” of up from poverty stories. And you can guess what they mean by wrong kind.

American popular culture takes its cues from this environment and then spreads them to the world. Pop culture glamorizes the well-meaning fraudster from Suits and Mad Men to Better Call Saul to Catch Me If You Can. They’re heroes because they reached the top rung through charm and guile without fancy schools. It’s no wonder that people would start to identify with these stories.

Unfortunately, the thing about those grifter heroes is that they’re just cogs in the bigger grift: to keep the rabble in line by fostering contempt for legitimate paths of upward mobility in favor of a fiction that will only earn them criminal charges in the real world.

Fraudster faked law degree to secure law firm roles [Legal Cheek]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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