Indian Hustle: How Fraudsters Prey On Would-be US Tech Workers 124
New submitter angel115 points out this article on the widespread fraud committed in India against many thousands of those seeking visas to work in the U.S. Many Indian techies rely on the services of visa brokers (or people who claim to be), and end up burned by the transaction. From the article: "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." Another interesting detail: As part of a U.S. government investigation, "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 [later published by Wikileaks]."
Why the exodus ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why the exodus ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never underestimate the number of naive people in the world who think the grass is always greener elsewhere. Sometimes it is, usually - unless you come from a slum in some no hope country - it isn't. Its just the same old sh1t but with a different view out the window.
Re:Why the exodus ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why the exodus ? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are still great reasons to immigrate to USA from India. Less corruption, great clean water and air, reliable power supply etc. But for a young man from a top school contemplating US grad schools/jobs, the biggest stumbling block is the lack of domestic help. Indian girls refuse to marry and move to America because they have to do all the house work. They might be willing to cook and may be load the dishwasher. But cleaning toilets is considered the beneath their dignity. It is nearly impossible now a days to persuade Indian women without IT career prospects to immigrate to USA. Indian women with career in IT get to marry the top honchos in India and get to live a life of luxury.
I thank my lucky stars for immigrating in the early 1990s for my wonderful wife.
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Indian girls refuse to marry and move to America because they have to do all the house work.
Middle-class Indian women -- who are expected by most Indian men to be responsible for all the housework and in India have the benefit of servants -- refuse to marry and move to America because they are still expected to be responsible for all the house work but have no one to delegate it to.
One would think that at least some marriages would could make it work, especially those where the bride comes
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I do see a lot of bigoted comments in the whole chain.
Do understand that all the things mentioned here are part and parcel of developing countries where concept of equality etc takes time to manifest.
Since we are going the anecdotal way, amongst my friend circle it is quite different. None of us bar one stayed in America and not because manual work is beneath them. Everyone wants to stay in India now, due to myraid reasons ranging from bigger opportunities, parents a,d relations etc.
Similar to Japan being m
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There was no bigotry involved. I didnt say all Indians are pretentious idiots who think they shouldnt have to clean up after themselves, I said I've known a few who were. Most Indians I know are not like that at all, which makes the pretentious ones I have known all the more noteworthy.
My post was in the context of the GP saying how the top crust Indian elites were no longer coming to the US as they couldnt get away with their elitism here as much as they can there. I was just saying this is a Good Thing.
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I grew up not knowing what a Brahman was.
My dislike for them is based on having 'worked' with a few of the motherfuckers.
I've also worked with lower caste Indians who were smart and worked hard.
Brahmen detection in a job interview is a necessary skill in California. No matter what side of the interview desk you are on.
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My understanding is that most immigrants don't immigrate without a fair idea of what they'll see on the other side and some help to ease the transition.
Most immigration throughout history, especially America's, is more about escaping from a shitty situation, not because people know what they'll see on the other side.
The history of the US is full of immigrants escaping from a shittier situation back home. The early colonists were full of people persecuted for their religion. Later ones came due to economics, war, escaping from communism, etc.
When you're escaping from a hellhole, you don't have to know a whole lot about the place you're going to. All you rea
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When you're escaping from a hellhole, you don't have to know a whole lot about the place you're going to. All you really needed to know was "it beats the hellhole I live in now".
No, you do not need to know it. You just need to assume it.
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Actually the grass IS greener here in the USA. The USA has huge sections of untouched land that is some of the greenest grass around.
Sadly you cant afford to own any of it, because the rich have intentionally suppressed wages way down so that tech employees could never hope to afford to own land.
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Can't afford to own land? WTF? Geek squad does not make you a tech employee.
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... almost nobody owns land in the USA.
I think this one might be a troll...
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Actually the grass IS greener here in the USA. The USA has huge sections of untouched land that is some of the greenest grass around.
Sadly you cant afford to own any of it, because the rich have intentionally suppressed wages way down so that tech employees could never hope to afford to own land.
You live too close to the city! City land is expensive, that's true anywhere.
Get out of the cities, they are dying anyway...
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India is a slum. People shit on the sidewalk in Mumbai. There is heartbreaking poverty everywhere you look. And stink and pollution.
If you had a chance to leave on a plane to the US you'd seen in the movies, you'd be off like a shot.
Shit, even if you'd only watched Jersey Shore and Real Wives of Portland you'd be off like a shot.
Shit, even if you'd only watched Trailer Park Boys you'd be off like a short (yes I know it's Canadian).
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"And these problems cannot be solved by stopping any such research. Or you would have had a country with lots of problems and not even a space program for that matter"
ITYF all western countries that have space programs have a basic healthy standard of living amongst their population. They don' t have tens of millions of people without clean water and infested with disease.
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The US is exporting movies .. stereotyping the "lifestyle" to the rest to the world. It is not unexpected for people out there to think that life in the US is easy and everyone has a 2 garage home and bimbo for wife.
I also see in US movies gratuitous violence, racial problems and people blowing each other's heads off with guns. Gran Torino for example, and that's set in a middle class area. I'll just stick to the movies, thanks.
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Gran Torino was set in a lower-class neighborhood. You may or may not have noticed the street gangs. Street gangs are not a feature of a middle-class neighborhood.
Everybody thinks they are "middle class". I am also sorry to break it to you that, evidently, you are lower-class.
Well, I am always willing to learn more about US culture, and if that, a district of detached houses with lawns and garages, was a lower class area the US is wealthier than I thought. Admittedly, it did look a bit run down, but I would have judged a lower class area as one with old, run-down terraced houses divided into apartments, and I've seen those in US movies too. The fact that street gangs were in an apparently middle class district was my point.
As for my being lower class, well, LoL, that's a ve
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"Well, I am always willing to learn more about US culture, and if that, a district of detached houses with lawns and garages, was a lower class area the US is wealthier than I thought"
Most US houses are made of cheap chipboard and land is cheap outside of the cities. The fact that the buildings look nice to you obviously means that US builders can do their job properly whereas the ones in your country apparently can't.
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Is that why I want my B1H visa for working in India?
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http://www.psychologytoday.com... [psychologytoday.com]
Re:Why the exodus ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't They just live and work in India?
Why in the world would they want to do that if given a choice? Sure they have a growing middle class and an Indian software developer lives pretty well considering he is living in India. He/she can afford to live in a reasonably furnished apartment without rats or vermin, afford to feed their family and eat well, and even achieve the pinnacle of middle class success in India, possession of your very own A/C unit to keep you cool in the sweltering summers (as long as the power actually works).
The one thing they will always live with however is the gross overpopulation, the crumbling infrastructure and the graft fraud and bribery that becomes a part of just daily living. A friend of mine from India told me to imagine your day, you get stopped by a cop for a minor infraction, pay a bribe or go to jail. You wait 8 hours in line to get your drivers license renewed unless you bribe the guy at the door to be queued ahead. Somebody can break into your home and steal what little you have and the cops just don't care.
He told me Americans are spoiled not because we are wealthy, but because we don't see Justice as the luxury it really is. Until you live in an overcrowded country that has 400 million starving people in the streets and has rampant corruption and a generally low value on human life, then you will never truly understand how valuable Justice in a society really is. He is slightly amused watching our countries political battles and scandals.
I appreciated his perspective and where he came from in life, and I wouldn't begrudge anybody who would want to come live here if they didn't care for that life anymore.
Re:Why the exodus ? (Score:4, Informative)
Can't They just live and work in India?
The whole reason why India became such a hot supply of labor is that when a refrigerator is a luxury purchase and electricity is so hit-and-miss that companies build their own private power plants, the cost of living is a LOT lower. You could buy lunch for an entire week for USD $1. Try that at a New Jersey McDonalds. Even today, after 10+ years of Indian professionals pushing salaries up, they still don't get paid anywhere near what westerners do.
So, given a choice between getting well-paid by Indian standards to work in India, or an opportunity to get what amounts to a fantastic salary in the US and other western countries as an H1-B or equivalent - even if they are underpaid by US standards, a lot of them come to the US with the idea of building up an enormous retirement fund, then taking it home to India where it will buy much more than it does in the USA.
Often, however, they end up getting seduced by American-style living. I know quite a few with big fancy air-conditioned houses with modern appliances and an SUV or 2 in the drive. Their main concession is that they generally don't crank the A/C down to 65 like some of my native-born neighbors do.
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Can't They just live and work in India?
Why can't we all be able to live and work wherever we want?
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Can't They just live and work in India?
From your perspective, India seems cheap... but for your average American job that pays $30K their still getting barely above a living wage in India and there's 10 people behind them willing to take that from them. The same job in the US allows them to own a car, a house, live in a nice city.
On the flip side, earning US$30K p/a in India allows you to live a very good life... but it's not a common wage.
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I do (Score:3, Interesting)
Who is it that supports immigration controls, exactly?
If you have no immigration controls then you will essentially have a situation where people will move to other countries speculatively. This will put a vast strain on resources like education, and so on. You also need to decide how you are going to handle out-of-work benefits, and historically courts have often differed in decisions on entitlement from what the government intended (how do you deal with a family with one foreign born parent - and are courts going to decide that the same must apply to an exte
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The left don't believe in artificial borders
The left built the Berlin Wall.
Flamebait (Score:1)
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We could stop hiring these people and hire skilled (Score:1)
But instead the US companies use these indentured servants to keep skilled labor wages down.
There is nothing more fun than wasting hours every day explaining basic concepts to our h1-b teams who can barely communicate in English. The customers certainly love the cryptic messaging in the software.
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There is nothing more fun than wasting hours every day explaining basic concepts to our h1-b teams who can barely communicate in English.
So don't explain them. Let them figure it out. Agree amongst yourselves not to prop up gross incompetence. You don't have to be blatant about it: just explain at the same level you'd explain to someone of average competence, and let it be their responsibility to figure out the rest.
This is the sort of thing where even the most primitive organization of labor would act in your favor. "Why isn't this done?" "That guy over there." "He says you didn't explain things." [response of everyone] "Yes, we did. He is
Arn't techies supposed to be smart? (Score:2)
To me this just seems like a good way to weed out the idiots.
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People tend to look at others through eyes that are a microcosm of their belief set(s).
Despite popular wisdom to the contrary, it is more difficult to con a con than a rube.
Green card indentured servitude (Score:2, Interesting)
The misery doesn't end if they actually get into the US with a job. Once they apply for a green card US law requires they work for the same company for 7 years. The contracting companies use this to their advantage. I've seen friends being delayed given documents needed to prove how long they worked. I don't know all the details of what they go through, but I've heard enough to not want to hire from certain companies again.
worth the risk? (Score:2, Interesting)
Boo Fu*king Hoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, am sounding insensitive to folks in India. However, am sitting on the other side, where my company has moved all Sys Admin and Database Admin overseas. Posting Anon to keep my resume hopes up. When the f*ck are we going to wake up and take care of our country? Folks collectively spend billions getting the degrees and experience, only to get jobs at Walmart; where they can't even pay their student loans. To top it, we continue to support FB, Google, M$ and others who continue to push for underpaid H1V1 visas...
Re:Boo Fu*king Hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like you're saying "I have problems too, so why should I care about someone else's problems?" Which is fair, no one is asking you to donate money to help H1V1 scam victims, but "boo fucking hoo" is pointless, and misdirected.
Re:Boo Fu*king Hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Victims all around, but the perpetrators are your fellow American capitalists...not Indians or anyone else trying to find a job to support their family.
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India long had the most restrictive import regulations of any large nation.
Look were it got them. India is a poster child for the failure of protectionism.
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That would be stupid. Business owners should be free to hire who they like. Likewise, workers should be free to unionize and consumers should be free to boycott in response.
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Until it becomes not worth the effort to screw-over the American worker, companies will continue destroying the job market, as long at it's profitable.
Why do they do this ?
Not because there's a need for skilled workers, we have plenty (but not at a cheap enough cost).
They do this shit because companies can claim a deduction for:
1. The costs associated with moving jobs overseas.
2. Deduction for moving a plant overseas.
3. Defer paying taxes on income earned overseas.
There are more rewards for the bastards.
Law
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'All Stars' eschew certs. Certs are for mediocretins.
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However, am sitting on the other side, where my company has moved all Sys Admin and Database Admin overseas.
Who swaps out a bad hard drive?
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A hardware technician. You don't need that many of those.
Or you virtualise as much as possible, and then you need even fewer hands on site.
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What happens if your internet connection goes out?
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That's why you have more than one of those. And outsource to the telecom company.
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China too (Score:2, Informative)
I lived in China for a while and similar scams were common there. I remember having to explain to a friend there, a trained nurse, why paying around $1500 up front for a company that said they would get her a Canadian visa and a (huge by Chinese standards) salary around $1200 a month. It was not an immigration visa that would let her stay long term, but a domestic servant visa for a live-in job caring for an Alzheimer's patient.
The Canadian embassy had warnings on their web site that 'visa consultants' were
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There are lots of quite eager visa-seekers. As a late-50s Canadian male in China -- without a large income and not remarkably handsome even as a young man -- I got several marriage proposals from attractive women in their thirties. One lass proposed within minutes of meeting me and several offered to pay me.
Even Those That Aren't Seem Pretty Bad (Score:2)
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but they don't appear to be willing to do that.
AIUI the problem is that the US has H1B (and possiblly other visas but H1B seems to be the main one) visas that mean the immigrant can't easilly change jobs and if they lose their job they will most likely be sent home. This puts the employer in a much stronger position than they would be if they were employing an american citizen or permanent resident.
If the immigrant puts up with the shit for a sufficint number of years then AIUI the can generally become a permanent resident (and eventually if they wish a
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Fraudsters are being defrauded, so what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Correct me if I misunderstood something here but these people are trying to commit visa fraud themselves. They are paying a company for the purpose of getting a visa just so they can get into the country to look for a job with other companies in the US and transfer their visa. They know that these are shell companies that will not actually employ them.
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Correct me if I misunderstood something here but these people are trying to commit visa fraud themselves. They are paying a company for the purpose of getting a visa just so they can get into the country to look for a job with other companies in the US and transfer their visa. They know that these are shell companies that will not actually employ them.
How would they have any idea that visa fraud would be involved? There is bureaucracy, which might be impossible to penetrate for someone who doesn't have knowledge how this bureaucracy works. You hire someone who knows best what forms to fill out, where to send them and so on. It's as much fraud as hiring a lawyer to defend yourself in court, or hiring a CV writer to create a much better CV than you could.
Nothing new (Score:1)
Request for Feedback from actual Indians (Score:1)
I would think a thread like this on an IT-oriented site would drum up quite a bit of feedback from Indians that have migrated to America (under any circumstances). Though I share the same sentiments as many U.S.-based posters have (hate cleaning-up/debugging horrible code, dealing with people who hide their lack of comprehension behind a Yes-Man veil, etc), I'm curious how "the other half lives".
What drives someone in India to come to the US, rather than improving their situation at home?
What challe
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What drives someone in India to come to the US, rather than improving their situation at home?
Different reasons depending on the route one takes. For those like me that took the educational route, perhaps it was disillusionment with things back home coupled with having a dream and a getting new opportunity to start things fresh and try something that wasn't possible back home. As Ind
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debug22,
Thank you for the response. It really sheds some light on the situation and I appreciate the first-hand experience you shared. Now I'm really curious about Canada - If it's so easy to get a green card, why aren't IT companies setting up support shops north of the U.S.A instead of directly importing people?
This constant back-and-forth with various agencies trying to hash-out visas here in the U.S. has always struck me as large waste of time and money for everyone involved...
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The thing that surprises me, is the difficulty of getting permanant status after completing graduate school.
My friend has been a productive member of the US working class, and depending on how things with applications, has a 1 in 3 chance of staying here. It makes no sense to me, because it seems like the opposite effect of a brain drain, people come here, get educated, then are sent home.
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The thing that surprises me, is the difficulty of getting permanant status after completing graduate school.
My friend has been a productive member of the US working class, and depending on how things with applications, has a 1 in 3 chance of staying here. It makes no sense to me, because it seems like the opposite effect of a brain drain, people come here, get educated, then are sent home.
I would guess that, in the past, a lot of students were sent here by governments or companies back home. If the students got permanant visas on graduation, meny of those would not return home. And, the governments and companies would not send students here to the schools.
It is likely that the schools themselves convinced the politicians to make that law...
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(I haven't migrated to the US, but I am working outside India.)
What drives someone in India to come to the US, rather than improving their situation at home?
Money. Indian salaries are still very low as compared to US salaries, especially in Silicon Valley. Improving your situation at home means that you do the same job for a third of the money (at best), or less (usually about a 5th to a 10th).
Keep in mind that the wage gap in India is huge, unlike the US. This means that someone with 15 to 20 years of exp
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Crude oil (Score:1)
Can't USA just stop importing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I did not know that sociopathic tendencies, like destroying lives, have become the new standard in capitalism. But you must be right. this is not "capitalism", what we have now days, this is new and improved "global capitalism".
People should really try to evolve beyond "but, but... this is economic incentives" bull shit excuse and start looking at the bigger picture.
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If you want to 'own' a job, start a business. Otherwise shut the fuck up.
If losing a job destroys your life, you were unprepared for life.
The sociopaths here are the entitled workers, who think they are set for life, regardless of business reality.
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Why is moving jobs to foreign country not treated as treason?
You may be interested to know that treason is the only crime defined in the United States Constitution.
It is defined in Germany as a violent attempt against the order of the Federal Republic of Germany (for high treason), or betraying a state secret for the purposes of harming the state (for treason).
India is not the United States' or Germany's enemy, even serving i
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In the US, the Constitution says that treason consists of waging war against the US, or aiding and abetting its enemies. How does moving a factory apply?