Earlier this week, ABC’s 730 Report uncovered an elaborate multi-million dollar fraud by a syndicate of Indian migrants that ran dodgy ‘ghost colleges’ providing fake diplomas to fake students:
Bobby Singh was the owner of private college St Stephen Institute of Technology. Mr Singh ran it as a “ghost college” as part of a multi-million-dollar scam…
He arrived in Australia at the age of 18 in 1999… In 2011, Mr Singh found himself in a new business: he took ownership of a registered training organisation called the St Stephen Institute of Technology…
On the day the audit was announced, Mr Singh made several phone calls instructing the members of his syndicate — Mr Sharma and Rakesh Kumar — to begin preparing the colleges for the audit, by making assessment records…
Across days of these surveillance tapes, not a single class was taught in accordance with the timetable that was given to ASQA.
On 20 of the 23 days the surveillance device was active, only three days showed any students attending the college.
…the computers actually weren’t networked, they weren’t connected to anything. So they basically just brought in all this material to comply … with the compliance visit.”
The particular type of scheme is known by some who work in the vocational training sector as a “ghost college”…
“It looks like a training college, when in fact students are not really doing their training, they’re actually out working or doing something else with their time”…
“They take that money, and then basically tell the students that you don’t have to come [in], just give us your money, and we’ll just give you the certificate”…
“They come out to Australia, they paid a lot of money to get their certificates … and they’re basically fake,” Detective Superintendent Woodward said.
The existence of ghost colleges is well known. A few months back, the Australian Skills Quality Authority warned that criminals using “ghost colleges” offering “fake vocational training programs” had fuelled the surge in bridging visa applications to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal:
[Former High Court justice Ian Callinan] said “almost everyone” with migration law experience had told him there were applicants and representatives who “game the system, well knowing there is an automatic entitlement to a bridging visa”.
The Australian Skills Quality Authority told Mr Callinan that delays had repercussions beyond the AAT. It told him it was aware that organised criminals were sometimes, “perhaps even regularly”, benefiting from fake vocational training programs or “ghost’’ colleges…
The AAT now handles about 59,000 lodgements a year: more than half (52 per cent) are migration and refugee cases…
Dr Bob Birrell from the Australian Population Research Institute also claimed that private ghost colleges are offering cheap diplomas to satisfy skilled visa applications, and that these were aimed primarily at students from India’s Sub-continent:
“It has little to do with the excellence of the education that’s offered here,” he said. “It seems to be effectively selling access to jobs and permanent residence.”
Home Affairs Department figures show Indians are the biggest applicants of the 485 student visa… Many Indian students afterwards apply for permanent residency, with more than 4000 given skilled independent visas onshore in 2016-17…
History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. Because we heard exactly the same shenanigans a decade ago:
In 2002 there was just over 11,000 Indian students in Australia, and by 2005 this number had grown to over 27,000… However, by last year enrolments had grown even more rapidly up to nearly 100,00 students, and most of the growth was in private vocational colleges where enrolments of Indian students increased at a startling rate, from 2,600 to 47,400 in three years.
…there are low quality providers who cater almost exclusively to international students seeking fast and easy qualifications to support migration applications. By last year, 14,400 Indian students were studying in private colleges in programs grouped under the ‘food, hospitality and personal services’ classification, accounting more than a quarter of all students in these programs.
For several years many in the Australian international education industry have been warning that the rapid growth of private colleges providers focused on migration pathway programs posed serious threats…
Dodgy colleges continue to act as shady middle-men to Australia’s immigration system, clipping the ticket for those seeking backdoor access to Australian working rights and permanent residency.
Indian international students appear to be both the key users and victims of this scam.
