Yeah, similar story from Western Europe - graduate consultancy gave me 3 months of Java programming material to essentially self-teach myself straight out of university with 0 programming experience. 3 months later I was starting a C# role at a bulge bracket investment bank where the team was expecting someone with at least some exp. seeing as I was costing 75kpa to them (I received 20k as salary).
Only reason I didn't get sent back the first week was my boss taking a liking to me, same story for the other 30/40 'consultants' starting at the same bank at the same time.
Worse part was the precondition to accepting the graduate consultancy role was a 20k bond that I would have had to pay if I wanted to leave within 2 years of my first contract. While without them I wouldn't have ended up where I am today, at the same time they earned absolutely zero good will from me due to the terrible wage/cost ratio they gave me and the complete lack of any training while I had to take personal responsibility on the client site for my lack of experience.
At the client, trust me when I say that basically everyone else didn't want us to be there apart from my immediate line manager! Wasn't a fun experience getting grilled by the adjacent team lead, my boss's boss and the other developers on the team on things that I didn't know I didn't know.
It was quite harrowing to be frank, to feel like no one wanted you there but without any choice but to turn up to work under threat of a 20k fee for my 'education' if I quit, obviously without a job to be able to pay it.
How did you get to know what they told the client? Your bosses wanted you to know, so you didn't say the wrong things, if the client asked something? (eg so you knew to day yes if the client asked if you had two years experience)
They told client, I have 2 years of experience as Informatica developer and charged $50 per hour.
Before joining the project, I had never seen the Informatica tool.