Indian Hustle: How Fraudsters Prey on Would-be US Tech Workers

<strong>Indian</strong> <strong>Hustle</strong>: <strong>How</strong> <strong>Fraudsters</strong>
<strong>Prey</strong> on Would-be US Tech
Workers

NEW DELHI, India — It’s a simple
equation: India has millions of tech
geeks who would love to work in
the US.
But they need visas.
And the US issues just 65,000 of
these per year, under its so-called
H-1B program for high-skilled
workers.
The Facebook logo is reflected in a young
<strong>Indian</strong> woman's sunglasses as she
browses on a tablet in Bangalore on May
15, 2012. <strong>Indian</strong>s eager for US work visas
are prime targets for con-artists.
(Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)
For freelance techies, the
temptation is overwhelming.
And that, naturally, has opened up
a world of opportunity for
fraudsters.

Hundreds of small companies in India and the US claim to be able to arrange
an H-1B visa — for the right price. Some <strong>Indian</strong>s hand over money and never
see the broker again — a scam similar to the loan brokerage racket featured
in the movie “American <strong>Hustle</strong>.”
True, most H1-B visas go to <strong>Indian</strong>s, but the majority of these are snapped up
by big outsourcing firms like Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services and
Infosys.
That only serves to amp up the desperation felt by freelance techies.
Some are lucky enough to get a visa — only to find that the promised job in
the US doesn’t materialize. Then the visa holders are forced to return to
India after spending thousands of dollars just surviving.
No official figures are available for the number of frauds in India, but an
unclassified document released by Wikileaks showed that in 2009, US
consular officials cited H-1B scams as one of the two most common fraud
categories in India.

Jaspal Singh, a Delhi-based software professional, told GlobalPost that in 2010
he fell victim to a New York-based company called IT Holdings Inc.
“They took $2,500 from me for visa filing, but they did not file anything,” he
said. “After few months they refunded $500.”
Singh was not the only victim. Nitin Mohan, also from Delhi, lost $1,000 to IT
Holdings Inc in Jun 2010, he told GlobalPost. After months spent trying to
persuade them to refund his money, he eventually posted a thread on Trackitt,
an immigration site. Four other people came forward with similar stories.
Although Mohan tried to file a criminal complaint, attempts to contact the New
York Police Department from India proved fruitless. He has written off his loss.
The IT Holdings Inc website is defunct and a phone number listed as its main
contact point is not in service.
“They just disappeared,” Mr Mohan said. “They could be out there acting as a
different company and nobody would know.”

Techies use internet forums such as trackitt.com and on Goolti.com to post
reviews of working conditions at some of the thousands of IT companies
around the world.
Another victim claims to have lost $3,400 to a company that promised to
file an H-1B application but vanished instead. Others say they are promised
free or cheap training when they arrive in the US, but this was either
substandard or never materialize.
Crackdown?
Rajiv Dabhadkar, the chief executive of the National Organization for
Software and Technology Professionals (NOSTOPS), has been campaigning
for better conditions for IT workers for more than a decade.

“Between 25 and 40 people write to me every week saying they would like
to get to the US and asking which company we could recommend,” he said.
“These companies are a major problem. The main difference now is that it
has become so much more expensive to get H-1B visas. The visa process
fees have increased a lot.” Immigration officials ask more questions and
check documents more thoroughly than in the past, he added.
While there’s little evidence that the <strong>Indian</strong> government has pursued the
matter, in the US federal officers have had some success in fraud
investigations over the last few years.
• In March 2013, the founders of a Texas-based company called Dibon
Solutions were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit visa
fraud. Court documents filed by prosecutors claimed the brothers, Atul
and Jiten Nanda (and four of their employees), had recruited <strong>Indian</strong>
workers on the pretence they would work at the company headquarters
in Carrollton, Texas. Instead, they were hired out to other companies.
(Attempts to contact the company were unsuccessful.)

• In a separate investigation, Phani Raju Bhima Raju, an <strong>Indian</strong> national
based in Charlotte, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to five federal charges
relating to H-1B visa fraud. His company, iFuturistics, made an estimated
$13.2 million in six years by persuading <strong>Indian</strong>s to pay for their H-1B visas
and work in the US. “On one occasion a foreign national H-1B visa holder
had paid $2,500 to iFuturistics as a security deposit for processing her H-
1B visa,” according to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
spokesman in a press release. She was promised a salary of $60,000 but
“iFuturistics never provided the worker with any work assignments and
failed to pay her any wages.”
• Federal investigators arrested 11 people in 2009 on suspicion of a similar
scam. Vision Systems, a New Jersey company, faced forfeitures of $7.4
million for placing foreign workers in jobs they weren’t entitled to do,
replacing American workers. After a plea bargain, the two brothers who
ran the firm were given three years’ probation for unlawfully hiring aliens
and paid restitution of $236,250 to the US Citizenship and Immigration
Service.

Efforts to deal with the problem in India are limited. Data on attempted visa
fraud are not collected by the <strong>Indian</strong> Government or any of the bodies that
represent tech companies.
US officials in India make regular reports about fraudulent attempts to get
visas. These are not ordinarily published, but Wikileaks released a 2009
paper titled “India Semi-Annual Fraud Update.”
At the time, according to the report, the vast majority of fraudulent
applications came from the southern city of Hyderabad. Officers investigated
150 companies in the city and discovered that 77 percent “turned out to be
fraudulent or highly suspect.”
Officials uncovered a scheme where Hyderabadis were claiming to work for
made-up companies in Pune so the Mumbai consulate would be less
suspicious about their applications. “The Hyderabadis claimed that they had
opened shell companies in Bangalore because ‘everyone knows Hyderabad
has fraud and Bangalore is reputable,’” according to the internal
communiqué.

Ameet Nivsarkar, vice president of global trade development for
NASSCOM, the trade association for <strong>Indian</strong> IT companies, said:
“Unfortunately this does cause problems for the industry because of the
way they operate. They throw the entire H-1B programme into disrepute.
This is a legitimate industry that has a legitimate use of the H-1B
program.”
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