This is what can happen if you are offered an Australian visa for cash and it seems really easy. We had 4 Vietnamese people come to us recently with advice from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection that their visas were going to be cancelled. A short time later they were cancelled. We could have helped them get a legitimate visa but they had been ripped off by a scam with fake papers. If you use fake papers and get the visa you will be caught at some stage and be deported.
As reported in the Courier Mail on Saturday 7 November 2015, a local Vietnamese and a corrupt Australian Immigration manager took $500,000 from relatively uneducated Vietnamese, mostly farmers and created fake Australian visas. Fifty-seven Vietnamese in Australia have become illegal immigrants after paying a corrupt immigration officer over half a million dollars in bribes for visas.
This is a huge visa corruption scandal and has caused a major overhaul of visa approval processes. Most of the people caught up in this are Vietnamese farmers who do not speak English but were given visas for such jobs as accountants and teachers. They paid bribes to a Vietnamese middleman or knew the immigration officer. He was sentenced in the District Court in Brisbane to eight months’ jail for secretly receiving over $550,000 in bribes. Immigration has tracked down two of 59 people caught up in this scam and the others are trying to live illegally. There is no doubt they will be caught soon as the Immigration Department goes searching for them.
Immigration Department processes were so poor that ¬officers could manage a visa application from start to finish but this has been changed so different staff must approve different parts of the visa application. An immigration inspector at the airport saw two Vietnamese travellers lined up at Customs “acting nervously” and was suspicious when they did not speak any English as the skilled migrant visas they were holding were only for workers with fluent English. When the men were questioned in Vietnamese they said they were farmers. The two men were turned back at the airport and the probe into the scam began.
Yourvisa4australia attempted to help 4 of these people caught up in the scam but the fake papers the scammers had produced made it impossible to save their visas. We can often help people who are illegal but fake papers make it almost impossible. Using a registered migration agent will avoid this sort of scam. It is important also to understand that when people come to us and we find out they are illegal, i.e. have no current visa, our role is to help them as our clients. This may get them a visa or it may, in some cases mean we help them leave Australia with dignity and apply for a new visa outside Australia. We do NOT report them to Immigration.