Families in northern India are falling victim to scammers who take advantage of their eagerness to send their children to live in Australia.
Many families borrow money they can ill afford or scrape together years of meagre savings to employ a local agent who promises to arrange student visas, however many are left financially destitute when the application fails or the money is simply taken.
Even the legitimate visa agents are having increasing difficulty securing the golden tickets as the Australian government cuts back on the number of visas to curb spiralling population growth and its associated housing crisis.
From next year, only 270,000 foreign students will be allowed into the country to gain student visas, which will also allow holders to work under a set of conditions.
The federal government has also more than doubled the student visa application fee to $1,600, which, even if denied, is non-refundable.
Applicants must also pass higher English proficiency requirements and stricter criteria to determine a student’s genuine status.
One of the reasons cited for tightening visa requirements is to address widespread fraud.
An ABC investigation in northern India has uncovered fraudulent visa agents in that country but has also raised questions about the legitimacy of Australian colleges that overseas students nominate as their place of study.
Prinjal, a 19-year-old from Seedpur in Haryana, intended to study a business diploma at the Willows Institute, a private college in Adelaide, starting this July.
All the paperwork was being prepared by migration agency World Visa Advisors, which was located in the northern city of Chandigarh.
However, when the promised visa failed to materialise Prinjal’s brother visited the World Visa Advisors office, only to find it empty for two weeks.
Prinjal came to the terrible realisation that she was a victim of fraud, with her farmer father in danger of losing his farm because he borrowed $13,000 against it to send his daughter to Australia.
‘I just thought, ‘How can this happen to me?’ I felt like all my dreams had been shattered,’ Prinjal told the ABC.
In July, police reported they had arrested World Visa Advisors staff on suspicion of defrauding $1.2million from families with the false promise of student visas.
One Chandigarh police station alone said they had identified 400 families that have fallen victim to visa fraud, netting scammers $4.5 million in the first half of 2024.
The ABC also investigated the Willows Institute in Adelaide but on three occasions they sent reporters there it was closed.
Willows also had a minimal online presence, with a website, a Facebook page with 20 followers and an Instagram account with no posts.
Vocational training watchdog the Australian Skills Quality Authority told the ABC was under audit after receiving a referral from the Department of Home Affairs in May last year.
Its registration to teach was cancelled in June this year ‘due to the seriousness of the issues identified and in order to mitigate the risk of any further harm’.
The regulator received a complaint indicating that Willows Institute ‘may not be genuine’.
The director of Willows Institute, Dilpreet Singh, insisted to the ABC in an email that Willows Institute was ‘legitimate’.
He said the company will fight to get registration reinstated at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
International student enrolments have jumped from just over 520,000 to more than 810,000 in the past two years which has resulted in shonky education providers trying to ‘make a quick buck’ by gaming the system, Jason Clare said.
‘That growth … has lured people who really are here to work, not study,’ Mr Clare told the Australian Financial Review’s higher education summit.
‘It’s put the reputation of this industry under pressure, that’s a fact,’ Mr Clare said.
Almost 150 tertiary colleges have already been shut down for failing to show proof they were offering any training to students, while warnings had been given to a further 140 so-called ‘ghost colleges’.
In one instance, a college had not delivered any training or assessments for students since 2020.
Skills Minister Andrew Giles said colleges that had not been operating for the purposes of providing quality education had been weeded out and shut down.
‘The Albanese government is calling time on the rorts and loopholes that have plagued the VET sector for far too long,’ he said.
‘Under our government, there is no place for anyone who seeks to undermine the sector and exploit students.’
