An Elaborate Scheme to Defraud Indian Students
A number of Indian students in Canada are facing deportation after obtaining entry visas using college admission letters that travel agents in Jalandhar, Punjab, allegedly faked.
Indian media outlets have reported that more than 700 students face deportation, while the CBC show The Fifth Estate said that “dozens” of students were affected.
Police in Jalandhar have arrested Rahul Bhargava and are looking for his partners, Brijesh Mishra and Gurnam Singh. The trio, who operated Education and Migration Services, are accused of collecting large sums of money from prospective students and their families, and producing college admission letters that the students used to obtain visas. The agents even collected first-year tuition payments from the students.
To keep the scheme going, the agents would call the students upon their arrival in Canada and tell them that their academic program was full and they needed to enroll in another college.
Baldev Raj of Nakodar, Jalandhar, told The Fifth Estate that Mishra duped him out of $14,000, which was supposed to pay for two semesters of tuition for his daughter at Sheridan College, Ontario. Though his daughter had to enroll at a different institution, Hanson College, Raj never received a tuition refund from Mishra.
Raj’s daughter, like many other students, is facing deportation after the Canadian Border Services Agency discovered that their original admissions letters had been faked. Some of the students had been in the country for several years and were applying for permanent residency when they received the deportation order.
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Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
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