[powerof0ne]

Brasil has "belt ranks" for muay thai, too. I'm telling "you", there are legit gyms/camps with sash/belt ranks in kickboxing/muay thai. Some muay thai gyms even use prajiat(arm bands) as rank or colored t-shirts. I even know of MMA Schools that do this, it's not really that focused on compared to budo arts.
My third muay thai fight was in Canada and it was only about a year and a half of muay thai for me..I was weighing at this gym called "gold lion" and remember asking a guy there what sash are you? He looked at me weird and said nobody really cared much about rank at the gym. Trevor Smandych of Mike Miles gym who lost on the first episode of "Asian contender" also fought on that same card(he beat Mark Brackenbury on that card). We had to have a CMTA passport book that was stamped with our rank. Back than the CMTA pretty much authorized all the Vancouver, BC Muay Thai/kickboxing cards.
2 of the 3 styles I trained in that had rank also had something similar to kata. They were fighting combinations for each rank kind of like the Enshin kata but always done with a partner. "Coincidentally", one of them later added this and first learned kickboxing/muay thai under the person teaching the other style.
To be a black sash under the MTIA practically requires you to have fought for a pro world muay thai title. To be a master requires you to have trained 2 or more world champions. When I trained at Master Toddy's I saw Ben Garcia(was on MTV's True life special on muay thai), and he wasn't wearing a sash...Gina Caranno wasn't wearing a sash...and other pro fighters weren't too. 1. The sash comes off very easy 2. if you're a world champion do you really need a black belt/sash?
I know that the PKA and WKA "used to" issue Dan rankings, too. Not sure if they still do but I trained for a while with one of these black belts, he got it in England in the 80s and his full contact kickboxing was pretty solid(think he trained at Master A's).
This guy is also a cop, has been in the DEA, SWAT team etc. so I'm pretty confident that his claim of being a 1st Dan in kickboxing was true. The fact that he was built like a bodybuilder and could do the jump splits like Bas Rutten also made his claim believable too, go figure.