How ‘Asatyanarayana’streamlined fake visas

Hyderabad: P. Satyanarayana (43) from Anand Bagh, Malkajgiri, was not a regular con artist. His fraudulent methods were so convincing that even the US consulate and a few US universities were convinced about the originality of the documents he forged. Running a fake consultancy named Streamline Educational Consultants at Tarnaka, he successfully sent more than 160 students to universities abroad, mainly to the US, with fake documents.  He made a lot of money in several years till a team of Commissioner’s Task Force, East Zone busted his operation. 

 

“After his arrest we found that he had more than a 60 per cent success rate in the applications he processed using fake documents. He had processed more than 300 applications in the last three or more years. Few students were sent to the US on visitors’ visas,” said A. Sudhakar, sub inspector of the East Zone Task Force team. 

 

Satyanarayana had forged documents including educational certificates, bank balance statements, pay slips, fixed deposits of various banks like SBI Bank, Andhra Bank, ICICI and even land documents for his clients. These documents were submitted to obtain student visas. 

 

Like Satyanarayana, there are several others running fake educational consultancies in Hyderabad and are helping ineligible students to get US/UK visas by providing them with fake documents. 

 

A consultant collects up to Rs 40,000 as advance and later earns up to Rs 4 lakh when the student gets admission in the university. Some students get exposed during the interview at the consulate, while some make it to the US. 

 

This year the police  busted two major consultancies among other small-time frauds in the city. 

 

A US consulate cable released by Wikileaks in 2011 revealed that Hyderabad had been identified as a large centre of documentary fraud in visa processing. The most alarming matter is that many well-qualified students, who could easily get into good US universities by applying directly, were also trapped by the fake consultancies in Hyderabad. False advertisements by these consultancies in English dailies and TV channels lured the victims.  

 

“Many student applicants, even legitimate ones, are taken in by the document vendors. They present fraudulent packages of bank statements and land documents in their interviews, and they are guided by advertising and news articles, such as the one in Hyderabad which declared: ‘Study Part-Time, Work Full-Time’ on an F-1 student visa,” stated the Wikileaks cable, which was sent by the Fraud Prevention Programme of US consulates in Chennai. 

 

The cable further revealed that con men also give a huge number of Non Immigrant Visas (NIV) to the aspirants. In just an year, among the 3,083 fraud NIV cases in the entire country, 523 cases were from Hyderabad.