To succeed, a company must distinguish itself from others in its field of business. The competitive edge. That advantage which allows an organization to outperform its competitors. For Kishore Dattapuram and Kumar Aswapthi, owners of Nanosemantics, a staffing firm that provided skilled employees to technology companies for a commission, the advantage was having the potential recruit ready at a moment’s notice to employ. Not easy to provide, when those recruits were H1-B visas.
The H-1B visa program allows companies to hire foreign workers with specialized skills that may not be readily available in the U.S. labor market. But a lot of time and paperwork is involved to prove that the job is not being taken away from a U.S. citizen. To shorten that process for employers and gain their business, Dattapuram and Aswapathi schemed with Santosh Giri, owner of LexGiri, a legal process outsourcing firm that served as a “remote-virtual corporate immigration specialist for companies.”
These fraudsters submitted fraudulent H-1B applications which falsely represented those foreign workers had specific jobs waiting for them at designated end-client companies, when in fact the jobs did not exist. Dattapuram actually paid companies to be listed as end-clients for the foreign workers, even though the workers would never work for those employers. The scheme allowed Nanosemantics to obtain visas for job candidates before securing jobs for them, thereby giving Nanosemantics the unfair advantage over competitors to place those workers with employers as soon as those jobs were available.
Luckily, in the United States, there is no competitive edges for anyone if it is obtained illegally. On November 8, 2024, Dattapuram, Aswapathi and Giri were found guilty of immigration fraud.
Excellent job by the Department of Homeland Security Investigations in this case.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “H-1B Visa Fraud: Three Indian-Origin Men Plead Guilty In US Court” published by the Times Of India on November 8, 2024.
Three Indian-origin men have pleaded guilty this week in federal court to changes of visa fraud and conspiracy to commit visa fraud, according to police officials.
A press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California on Wednesday revealed that Kishore Dattapuram, a 55 year-old staffing firm owner from Santa Clara, California, along with Kumar Aswapthi, 55 , of Austin, Texas, and Santosh Giri, 48, of San Jose, California, were charged under an indictment filed on February 28, 2019. The charges included on count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud and ten counts of substantive visa fraud. Aswapthi admitted guilt to all chages on October 19, 2020, while Giri pleaded guilty on October 28 this year.