Visa fraud has been a serious problem in international student recruitment for many decades already. The increase in international student mobility and the use of agents and new technologies exacerbate the problem and require joint actions to combat this fraud in the interest of ethical policies for international student recruitment, in the United States and elsewhere.

Last year, a student at a prestigious university in the United States posted an essay on social media with the following title: ”I have built my career and life on lies.” He then proceeded to describe a recipe for success involving “a very structured fraud plan” involving fake documents and signature stamps from officials in his home country that enabled him to gain admission and scholarships. He was arrested shortly after the essay appeared on Reddit, pled guilty, was expelled and then deported. What is the lesson learned other than that one should avoid posting about such things on social media? 

Visa Fraud Is Not a New Problem

Over the past decade, there have been several federal cases settled for multimillion-dollar damages and fines paid by North American and foreign companies for fraud and abuse of the H1B visa system in the United States, as well as for the use of student visas for human trafficking. The higher education press has increasingly reported on cases of “ghost students” who never show up or do so only to transfer to another school where classes are minimal and work opportunities plentiful. When admissions officers analyze such absentee trends, some conclude that a notable number of international applications from certain places may have been fraudulent.

Visa fraud is not a new phenomenon or a new challenge.  In 1921, the Institute of International Education (IIE) reached an agreement with the Commissioner of Immigration of the United States to do an annual census of international students coming to the country—a country that had no visa provision for nonimmigrants at the time. In exchange for allowing foreign students and scholars to leave Ellis Island despite the nationality quotas and waiting lists, IIE was employed by the Consular Service to help the United States diplomats read foreign transcripts and applications. This relationship emerged because consular officers were seeing rising numbers of applications from students wishing to attend colleges in the United States with which officials were unfamiliar, and they were having difficulty reading foreign transcripts, making it hard to determine legitimacy.

Then as now, there were professionals who specialized in forging documents and assisting, for a fee, any person who sought to come to the United States to work instead of enrolling in academic degree programs. In several countries, IIE has been faced with applications of high quality and seemingly genuine letters of admission produced by street vendors and “licensed agents.” When asked at their visa interviews why they had chosen the field listed on their application, students assisted by such agents were often unable to answer because they had never read what was submitted in their name.

Are We Headed into a Perfect Storm?

Fraud has also gotten very sophisticated and organized. Some prospective applicants are being targeted by criminals who, masquerading as government officials from various ministries, are reaching out to their parents, expressing that they have learned of a student’s plans and are requiring that they subscribe to a special service to review and process an application. In some places, visa appointment “brokers” book all visa interview appointments and then sell the time slots when students learn that they cannot be interviewed until long after the academic term has started. Loan sharks and diploma mills collaborate as bad actors and then threaten indebted students with exposure of false credentials to employers unless more debt is taken on.

International recruitment agents are now used by nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities in the United States. Some of these agents are unscrupulous. Estimates range from one-fifth to one-third of agent-supplied applicants from some countries failing to show up or doing so with documents that falsify their previous academic records and performance.

All of these scams and document production processes are greatly enhanced by AI, which is outpacing the capacity of admission officers to detect its use. The effect is to harm the chances of those doing it right.

The website of the United States’ State Department contains a page devoted to passport and visa fraud that begins by noting that “passport and visa crime” has been a problem since 1916. “Common types of fraud” are enumerated, including “presenting false documents to apply for a visa” and “misrepresenting the reasons for seeking a visa.”

In the overall number of visa denials reported annually by the State Department, the number of cases of suspected fraud is not given. However, when asked, consular officers most frequently respond with “at least half.”.

It Is Critical for Higher Education to Be Proactive

With United States consular sections around the world prioritizing student visa appointments and issuing record numbers of student visas, it is important for higher education officials to actively join the battle against fraud. Experienced and well-resourced institutions should join forces to share best practices for combating fraud with less experienced institutions. Higher education actors should be constantly educating students and parents about what to look for in unscrupulous agents, confronting challenges posed by  applications being processed, and insisting that student applications consist entirely of the applicant’s own work. Also, they should use social media to tell the stories of the wide range of international applicants who apply without fraud, are admitted, and successfully secure visas.

As major international education, advising, enrollment management, and admissions organizations continue to work together to attract international students to higher education, it is also essential for them to lead a united effort to help combat visa fraud. Step one requires understanding the scale, contours, and seriousness of the threat—a working group from among these organizations should be established to do so. In the process, they can also begin distilling the lessons learned in the ChatGPT era about how to effectively combat something that should have no place in the admissions process or at the visa interview window.

The visa fraud problem is not unique to the United States. Similar issues are present in other countries, including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, all of which also use recruiting agents and encounter similar unethical practices on a regular basis. Sharing such experiences and working together to combat visa fraud and set common ethical standards is important. The Institute of International Education has an international network of organizations involved in international student mobility and recruitment, and will act together with organizations, both within the United States and globally, to address this problem in the interest of the millions of students who aspire to study abroad.

Allan E. Goodman is chief executive officer of the Institute of International Education, United States. E-mail: [email protected].