NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said 'the revelation that the government recently uncovered 10,000 fake admissions letter is extremely alarming.'Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
More than 10,000 foreign student acceptance letters from Canadian colleges and universities have been flagged as potentially fraudulent this year, according to the top immigration official in charge of international students.
Enhanced checks by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada have found scores of would-be foreign students who said they had a genuine place to study may have been attaching a fraudulent acceptance letter to their application to get into Canada.
The tighter checks were introduced after a group of international students applying for permanent residence last year faced deportation because an unlicensed immigration consultant in India had submitted fake acceptance letters with their applications for study permits.
Bronwyn May, director-general of the International Students Branch at the Immigration Department, told MPs last week that since IRCC started verifying acceptance letters from colleges and universities in the past year, officials have “intercepted more than 10,000 potentially fraudulent letters of acceptance.”
She said 93 per cent of the 500,000 acceptance letters attached to study permit applications the department checked in the past 10 months had been verified as genuine by a college or university.
But 2 per cent were not authentic, 1 per cent of applicants had had their place cancelled by a college or university, while in other cases, colleges and universities failed to respond to say whether the letters offering applicants a place to study were genuine.
She told the Commons immigration committee that the IRCC was making further inquiries into the source of the fraudulent letters.
Annie Beaudoin, a former immigration officer who is now a registered immigration consultant, said she was not surprised by the scale of the potential fraud.
She said before the enhanced system of checks was introduced, it was not uncommon to see questionable acceptance letters. In one case she noticed a group of young Korean women all with the same acceptance letter from the same institution. They were believed to be linked to a sex-trafficking operation.
“It’s a movement with a lot of fraud,” she said. “We were happy when the IRCC put in place a quick, efficient way to check whether they [acceptance letters] were issued.”
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said “the revelation that the government recently uncovered 10,000 fake admissions letter is extremely alarming.”
“It’s unconscionable that the Liberals allowed unscrupulous actors to exploit and abuse international students for so long,” she said in an e-mailed statement. “Not only does the government need to identify who those actors are, they need to also identify the institutions that may be collaborating in any fraud schemes.
“It is important to not just protect the integrity of the program, Canada also has a responsibility to ensure that international students in Canada that have been defrauded are protected.”
Ottawa launched a probe into 2,000 suspicious cases involving students from India, China and Vietnam last year. It found that around 1,485 had been issued bogus documents to come to Canada by immigration consultants abroad.
Many were refused entry to Canada after their letters of acceptance from colleges were found to be fake, but others had already arrived.
Since December last year, colleges and universities have been required by IRCC to verify letters of acceptance through an online portal. On Jan. 30 this year, the measure was extended to study permit applications and extensions submitted from within Canada.
Jeffrey MacDonald, an IRCC spokesperson, said getting colleges and universities to verify that acceptance letters are genuine “helps deter bad actors” while protecting prospective students from document fraud.
He said fraudulent letters include altered genuine letters, letters which are no longer valid, and fakes. Prospective international students found with fraudulent documents face being barred from entering Canada.
After potentially fraudulent letters are intercepted, the IRCC probes further, he said. “It is important to note that if a review determines that the individual in question is a genuine student, they can be granted a temporary resident permit, and the finding of misrepresentation related to the fraudulent letter of acceptance will not be considered on future applications.”
Conservative immigration critic Tom Kmiec criticized the government in a statement for issuing vast numbers of student visas “without sufficient oversight or care for the consequences.”