Online Guard Cards is a California guard-card training platform built by people who have actually worked the job. Our founder spent nearly three decades in law enforcement before building this. The in-person hours California requires are delivered by our BSIS-licensed training partner, Whitestar Group, in Santa Rosa. We built this platform because California's existing guard-card training market wasn't serving working people.
Plain-English. Mobile-friendly. Built around current BSIS requirements. Designed for people who need to get back to work — or move up — without spending two weekends in a windowless classroom.
Every certificate we issue carries the signature of a real, named, licensed compliance officer — not a shell company.
Mark Adams served as a full-time sworn officer from 1989 to 2003, and again part-time from 2005 through 2018. Across that career he worked both Patrol and the Investigations Division, with specialized training in violent crimes, forgery and fraud, property crimes, crimes against persons, and narcotics — including several years assigned to the Sonoma County Narcotics Task Force as an undercover narcotics officer.
He and his team logged thousands of hours of surveillance work — static, mobile, aerial, and electronic. Mark is a court-certified expert witness in the Sonoma, Mendocino, and Marin County Superior Courts for both narcotics matters and workplace employment investigations. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Management from St. Mary's College, Moraga, and in 1996 completed the DOJ-sponsored Robert Presley Institute of Criminal Investigations, earning his advanced certificate in criminal investigations. In 2009 he was accredited by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners as a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE).
Since 2013 Mark has specialized in public- and private-sector workplace investigations involving complex discrimination and harassment claims, and is a member of AWI — the Association of Workplace Investigators. He is also CEO of Whitestar Group, the BSIS-licensed provider that delivers Online Guard Cards' required in-person training in Santa Rosa, and he personally signs off on the coursework behind every certificate we issue.
In late 2025, California passed Senate Bill 652, requiring that 5 of the 8 BSIS pre-assignment hours — the Appropriate Use of Force portion — be delivered in-person, by the same provider, starting January 1, 2026. The intent was to professionalize training. The effect was that every 100% online guard-card provider in California suddenly became non-compliant.
Hundreds of thousands of California guards — and tens of thousands of new applicants every year — were going to be left without a legal path to certification. Most existing providers either kept selling non-compliant courses (and won't tell their students), or quietly raised prices to "deal with the new requirement" without actually changing their delivery model.
We built Online Guard Cards as the first SB 652-native hybrid platform — designed from day one around the new rules, with five California in-person locations, transparent pricing, and an AI-powered Navigator to route students to exactly the right course for their situation.
The mission is simple: get California guards trained, certified, and back to work — the right way, the first time.
If our approach matches the way you actually want to learn, the next step is the right course for your situation. Tell us your situation and we will point you to it.