(Image source from: Darpan Magazine)
An Indian Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has been charged with H-1B visa fraud on nearly 200 counts.
A 49-year-old Pradyumna Kumar Samal, a native of the state of Odisha, was arrested on August 28 upon landing at Seattle-Tacoma Airport in the state of Washington, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a press release a day later.
During his term of office as CEO of two technology firms starting in 2010, Samal allegedly ran a multi-year visa-fraud racket. The two Redmond, Washington-based entities he headed were Information Technology services firm Divensi and geospatial data processing company Azimetry.
Samal has been accused of using a "bench-and-switch" scheme to "exploit foreign-national workers, compete unlawfully in the market, and defraud the U.S. government," as per the DOJ.
The complaint says Samal forged fraudulent letters and statements of work to get foreign nationals visas under the specialty occupation category. He made it appear as though corporate clients had agreed to use these employees when, in fact, they had not. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved the applications based on fake documents, Samal's firms "benched" them, leaving them unpaid until they could actually be placed at a client's site.
Till now, nearly 200 workers have fallen prey to this scam. The victims were even forced to pay Samal's two companies a partially refundable "security deposit" of up to $5,000 for the visa filings - a hefty charge considering that no work or salary was guaranteed.
Some comments on Divensi's page on myvisajobs.com, a work-visa monitor, suggest that the employer usually doesn't return the money at all.
Since its founding, Divensi has filed 1,139 labor condition applications, a precondition for H-1B visas; Azimetry has 929 in total.
Samal's representative Diane Butler of Davis Wright Tremaine law firm has refuted these allegations. The charges laid against her client "reflect the current hostility toward business immigration in a zero-tolerance environment," she told the Seattle Times newspaper.
If found guilty, the repercussions are going to be severe: up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
By Sowmya Sangam
