New Zealand’s student visa program is marred by recent incidences of fraud by Indian applicants which promoted Immigration New Zealand to issue deportation notices to several Indian international students who allegedly arrived in the country by committing fraud.
Now, government officials in the country have likened the fraudsters to “drug imposters who are using a shotgun tactic” to flood the country’s immigration system.
Quoting from a documents of a senior immigration official, that there was an “endemic use of fraud” in Indian student visa applications.
Justin Alves, a risk manager based in Mumbai, said fraudsters were using "a strategy akin to the 'shotgun' approach I saw illicit drug importers use when I worked alongside Customs".
He said this tactic was aimed at "saturating the channel with small, individual attacks in order to overwhelm the Government resources available to it".
Media reports earlier this year suggested nearly half of student visa applications from India were rejected due to some sort of fraud involved in the process.
“According to the figures, 10,863 applications have been turned down out of the 20,887 received so far this year, with 9,190 of those submitted via unlicensed education agents,” said .
The Punjab and Andhra Pradesh have been listed as “high-risk” regions due to a large number of fraud cases coming from these states.
New Zealand Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse said hundreds of students could be living in the country illegally but says after a crackdown last year, the Government now has the matter under control.
He said "thousands of these applications are being declined because they do not satisfy Immigration that they are bone fide."
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