According to India’s mainstream media report on 16 Mar (Thursday) and the Online Citizen website, the Canadian Border Security Agency (CBSA) has notified more than 700 Indian students for deportation. Students with fake admission offer letters to Canadian educational institutions who tried to gain entry into Canada have received this notice. This issue was spotted when some students started applying for permanent residency (PR) upon completing their studies. The CBSA found fake offer letters from Humber College compared to the original ones. Then, CBSA started inspecting all offer letters of the universities and found at least 700 students from India with fake college acceptance letters to apply for their study visas. CBSA then proceeded to deport the students.

According to reports, students with fake admission offer letters applied for study visas through Education Migration Services in Jalandhar, Punjab, from 2018 to 2022. The visa service agency owner, Brijesh Mishra, charged each student at least US$19.4K (16 lakh rupees) for all their costs in Canada. These costs include admission fees to Humber College in Toronto and exclude expenses of air tickets and security deposits.

According to Chaman Singh Batth, an affected student, they had applied for study in Canada through Mishra’s agency.

He added that when he and his fellow students landed in Toronto, Mishra called them to say that Humber College had all places in the courses been filled and that they would need to wait for another six months to start in the following semester. Then, Mishra offered them another college to save time.

Finally, Mishra advised the students to get admission into a lesser-known college that only offers two-year diploma courses, as they did not want to waste time waiting around for six months. He added that Mishra had not signed the applications and asked students to sign their letters as self-applicants.

This kind of fraud is said encountered by Canadian authorities for the first time. CBSA is now taking a strict rule and not accepting claims of innocence by the students. The reason was that there was no evidence to prove that agent Mishra had prepared and arranged the documents. Also, Mishra is not in Canada, and he is out of the jurisdiction of CBSA. The students sign all letters. Moreover, CBSA is not accepting the failure of the Canadian airport and visa authorities to check the authenticity of the college acceptance letters.

Finally, the only way left for the students is the deportation notices in court, where proceedings may last 3 to 4 years and require more money to spend on lawyers. Meanwhile, as per the reports, the parents of the cheated students could not find Mishra because he locked his office and was not accessible anywhere.

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