{"id":16352,"date":"2019-09-18T09:10:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T17:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/09\/18\/news-10093\/"},"modified":"2019-09-18T09:10:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T17:10:06","slug":"news-10093","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/09\/18\/news-10093\/","title":{"rendered":"International students in UK targeted by visa scammers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Christopher Boyd| Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 16:49:40 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

A new visa scam has come to light targeting international students from China studying in the UK. At least, it\u2019s being presented as new. In truth, it comes around every so often and has been on the radar for a few years.<\/p>\n

The scam works by presenting a threat to students\u2019 immigration status and uses various techniques to extract sizable payments from the victims. In the worst cases, it also embroils them in money mule scams<\/a> and that\u2019s a bad result for the students.<\/p>\n

Many of these attacks target specific regions in the UK with a high density of overseas students, and because all manner of immigration-related statistics are published regularly in the UK, it\u2019s an open-source goldmine<\/a> for people wishing to create a list of targets.<\/p>\n

A broad surface area of attack<\/h3>\n

The UK is hugely popular with international T4 visa students from China, with applications up some 30 percent since 2018<\/a>. Data available from the Higher Education Statistics puts this trend into sharp perspective<\/a>. As they mention:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Since 2012\/13 the number of entrants from China each year has exceeded the number from all EU countries combined.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the 2017\/18 academic year alone, the biggest international cohort was from China<\/a>, with 106,530 first year students. India was a distant second with just 19,750. What\u2019s particularly interesting is you can break this data down further and see which universities have the most students from specific regions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of those universities, as well as others with a strong Chinese student community, have had to give out repeated warnings to students about these attacks.<\/p>\n

Why are scammers targeting Chinese students?<\/h3>\n

Being a student in the UK on a T4 student visa is expensive<\/a>, so every penny counts. As one student notes in the article linked above regarding application increases, there is a stereotype that Chinese students in the UK all come from wealthy families. As many of these attacks result in large payouts for scammers, they\u2019ll simply keep doing what they see is working whether the target is actually wealthy or just surrounded by multiple student loans. After all, they only need to strike it lucky once.<\/p>\n

So, now that we\u2019ve look at why these particular students are hot targets, let\u2019s take a walk through a timeline of attacks stretching back to 2007.<\/p>\n

Back in the day<\/h3>\n

In 2007, student Jaiyue Wang was tricked into handing over \u00a36,000 to scammers based in Nigeria who\u2019d convinced her of half a million pounds in lottery winnings. When the prize didn\u2019t turn up, it hit her hard and she eventually committed suicide at her residence in Nottingham. An absolutely tragic end to a commonplace scam, and notable for potentially being\u00a0<\/span>one of the first well-known confirmed UK deaths off the back of one of these groups (here\u2019s another awful one<\/a> from 2004).<\/p>\n

These two attacks probably weren’t targeting students specifically; they just landed in people\u2019s mailboxes, like so many scams did way back when. However, targeting specific groups of people (students, workers, people from a certain region, and so on) would soon become commonplace.<\/p>\n

Wind forward a decade, and students are treated as an amazing opportunity for bad people to exploit and ruin while making a tidy profit in the bargain.<\/p>\n

2018\u20132019<\/h3>\n

2018 and 2019 have been fertile years for money mules. A typical scam usually plays out like this<\/a>, with students caught passing stolen sums of cash between various bank accounts. Elsewhere, the scale of the crimes committed are quite significant. Criminal gangs don\u2019t just exploit one or two students; they\u2019ll make use of as many as they can, resulting in hundreds of bank accounts being frozen by the National Crime Agency and students galore brought in for questioning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because these scams often rely on unwitting students, many are found to have already returned to China long after the fraud is discovered, which makes investigating even more difficult. And US$4.6 million in money mule shenanigans is not pocket change. Here\u2019s a similar scam from August of this year<\/a>, which involved another Chinese student, a \u201cbusiness opportunity,\u201d and a US$19 million money laundering\u00a0<\/span>operation targeting multiple students.<\/p>\n

The visa scam makes its move<\/h3>\n

The earliest reference I found to this visa threat targeting Chinese students is from 2015, though there are quite likely others prior to that. The UK Council for International Student Affairs warn of the following<\/a>:<\/p>\n