3rd-party fraud, security risks flagged in some Canadian visa hubs abroad: internal records

Of note. Officer comments are telling:

…CBC made an access to information request to IRCC in 2024 about government site visits to Bangladesh and Russia visa application centres, after hearing concerns from applicants.

The records took about two years to receive and contain emails and redacted reports between Canadian immigration and embassy staff and VFS employees. The documents note “deficiencies” and other issues, including overcharging applicants with “premium” fees, security screening concerns, technical outages, and a malware attack.

“We could write a novel about all the fraud we are seeing,” reads an email from a government official who was planning to visit Bangladesh in February 2024, alluding to third-party misconducts. They asked for more information on the “scale of fraud, most common types/trends of fraud, [and] the role [of] ‘consultants’ in the fraud we are seeing.” 

Those emails indicate Canadian officials were concerned about the type of appointment reselling in Dhaka that Uddin experienced — enough that they tried creating accounts and simulating booking as an applicant and ran into issues as well. 

Resellers were somehow block-booking appointments and selling them at high costs to desperate applicants trying to meet IRCC’s deadlines, according to the records.

“The fact that [redacted] of the clients need to go to third parties to be able to provide their passports to your office is also an issue. It means that [redacted] of the client do not have access to the service as they are supposed to,” a government official wrote to VFS in January 2024.

Canadian staff flagged that it was hard for clients to follow IRCC’s strict processing timelines “unless they use the premium services, which is more expensive,” calling that “a concern.”

“How can that be ethical?” asked Uddin, who pointed out that applicants already pay a standard processing fee to IRCC. “VFS should get the money they’re due from IRCC, not from the people.”

“They just made people hostages. You have to come through this back channel, pay some extra money,” Uddin added about the resellers….

Source: 3rd-party fraud, security risks flagged in some Canadian visa hubs abroad: internal records