San Antonio Security Training cheating

While trying to raise the standards within the security industry and provide a great service for its officers, our following encounter was disappointing from persons whom advertise to be “professionals” and want you to trust in them.

What is the world coming to when those that are supposed to be teaching classes on ethics and professionalism violate copyright laws among a few other civil actionable laws, to include a few DPS-RSD code of conduct and ethic violations? As any good sales or business person should do, we were checking out similar businesses in the state to compare what we offer and what they offer.

“It makes us question their testing and training standards”-TCTA 

To our surprise, we found a training academy in San Antonio, Texas using content (entire page of our website to include course outline, experience, etc. They did not just copy a picture, sentence, or paragraph, they copied and pasted an entire page as is  (specifically our Bodyguard training page) – a training class they offered but for some reason needed our content to lure in their students.  What was disappointing is that they are apparently (according to their site) law enforcement and prior military, but for some reason they did not have enough knowledge or experience in the industry to develop their own course information and/or program. In a way it is a compliment to use our ideas and website to sell your security training class while also acknowledging that we are professionals and know our stuff; but it is still insulting to steal from us and a copyright infringement as we told their owner/senior instructor.

This brings up a valid point while shopping around for
training and even security services in general.

It seems everyone is playing the old “Military Veteran” and or “Police Experience” name drop game to build trust with customers that generally don’t question anything. We all have to keep in mind that just because someone was in the military or police department does not tell you want type of officer they were while on the department and/or what type of soldier they were while in the military (both don’t mean they are great instructors by the way). We also don’t know what their exact job or duties were while throwing out prior titles, so don’t be afraid to ask detailed questions – they should not have any issues providing that information. Some ex-military/ex-law enforcement officers are found within the industry to not even have the experience they state or advertise, or even worse have been terminated or forced to resign from a department – so that renders any stated experience in my book void. 

After a few email exchanges with their owner “Brain” and promises of civil action and DPS-RSD notification, they (the S.A. school) removed our copied pages (stolen work) immediately. That’s great they corrected it so quickly (however, we still have the screen shot which we use in our ethics class), but sad it was done in the first place. Of course the “webmaster” was blamed, but why weren’t the owners, managers, and instructors generating their own original content like we do (which is relying on our real experience) instead of relying on a webmaster? My suspicion is the “webmaster” was the person I was in contact with (aka-instructor/owner); again, very sad and very unprofessional.

TCTA takes pride in the classes we put together, the time and cost to provide such a school and program to the industry, along with this being our source of income – as such we take any copyright, plagiarism, or theft of our products or work very seriously. Not only will we take legal action but we will ensure others know about it.  

September 3rd, 2011 by