million worldwide by the end of this year, “participating in education opportunities abroad is not without risk, including various types of fraud”. The APF added: “Common schemes include phishing
scams, in which students are asked for personal details to resolve issues with their visas or imaginary fines, and ‘ghost consultants’, or unlicensed representatives, who offer admissions to potential students for high fees, then abandon victims after collecting funds. “Earlier this year, two private Canadian colleges
were involved in international student scams, allegedly misleading Indian students about admissions to college programmes. This points to a lack of sufficient institutional and government oversight throughout the recruitment and admissions processes for international students, particularly within private institutions.” In fact, the problems for some Indian students in
“ THE HUMAN COST OF CYBER SCAM CENTRES CONTINUES TO RISE. ONLY CONCERTED GLOBAL ACTION CAN TRULY ADDRESS THE GLOBALISATION OF THIS CRIME TREND.”
ROSEMARY NALUBEGA, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES AT INTERPOL
Last year, the EU launched an investigation into
claims that Polish consulates had made thousands of dollars by issuing temporary work visas to migrants in Asia and Africa. And an Interpol investigation across 27 nations is continuing into organisations issuing bogus work visas to lure would-be migrants into human trafficking rings. In the spring, Supinder Singh Sian and Angel Skyers,
solicitors at London law firm Lewis Silkin, reported that scams were an ongoing concern for businesses and individual users of the immigration system. “Fraudsters are targeting both individual migrants
and sponsors,” they said. “For example, a person may be asked to pay a deposit as proof of being able to support themselves in the UK; the Home Office will never ask for this. Fraudsters seek to gain access to personal details through contacting immigration system users by email, text, phone or in person.” Meanwhile, the Asia Pacific Foundation (APF), a not-
for-profit organisation focusing on Canada’s relations with Asia, recently warned that, with the number of Indian international students expected to reach 1.8
32
Canada have gone much deeper than that. Last year, about 700 of them faced being deported after the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) laid charges against an Indian national, currently living in British Columbia, for issuing false letters of admission from Canadian educational institutions. The students had all paid thousands of dollars for study visas through Education Migration Services, a firm located in Jalandhar, India. This May, the Canadian parliament’s immigration committee called on Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault and Immigration Minister Marc Miller to testify on what the government was doing to clamp down on illegal job selling to immigrants. The committee’s motion cited reports in the ‘Globe and Mail’ newspaper about jobs-for-sale scams in which international students and foreign workers are being illegally charged thousands of dollars by unscrupulous employers and consultants to get a job in Canada. “Immigration consultants and lawyers, aware of
the practice, say they fear the scams may get worse as international students, squeezed by recent changes to the postgraduate work-permit programme, will search for other ways to stay and work in Canada to rack up points to qualify for permanent residence,” according to the ‘Globe and Mail’. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, almost 200 employers
have had their licences to hire migrants revoked or suspended – with another 167 remaining under investigation by the government’s Immigration New Zealand agency – because of potential work visa abuse. According to the online information site VisaGuide.
World, concerns were first raised about migrant workers from India, China and Bangladesh living in cramped and unsanitary conditions. “Local media reports noted that migrants claimed to have paid thousands of dollars for work visas, only to be left with little to no work.” It is a scenario being repeated in too many
nations the world over. In the UK, the government’s independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) said in its 2024 report that it was “extremely concerned about the exploitation of migrants and the abuse of the
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106
