International Students In UK Targeted By Visa Scammers. A new visa scam targeting international students from China who are studying in the UK has been detected. It has been presented as new, but the truth is that it comes around very often and has been on the radar for a few years now. The scam works in a way that present a threat to students immigration status and uses various techniques to extract sizable amount from the victims. The worst of all is that, it also them in money mule scams and that’s a very bad result for the students.
International Students In UK Targeted By Visa Scammers
Most of these attackers targets specific regions in the UK that has high density of overseas students, also because all manner of immigration-related statistics are published regularly in the UK, it’s an open-source goldmine for individuals who wish to create a list of targets.
A broad surface area of attack
The amount of students with the highest population in UK is the international T4 visa students from China, with applications up some 30 percent since 2018. Available data from the Higher Education Statistics puts this trend into sharp perspective.
Since 2012/13, the number of entrants from China every year has exceeded the number from all EU countries combined. In 2017/2018 a academic session alone, the biggest international cohort reported was from China, with 106,530 first year students. Indian was a distant second with only 19,750. The most interesting part is that you can break this data down further and see which universities have the most students from specific regions. Many of these universities, most especially the ones with a strong Chinese student community have had to give out repeated warnings to students ts about attacks.
Why are scammers targeting Chinese students?
Being on a T4 student visa in UK is very expensive, so every penny counts. There is a persistent incorrect stereotype that Chinese students in the UK all come from wealthy families. Most of these attacks result in large payouts for scammers, therefore, they’ll simply keep doing what they see is working whether or not the target is actually wealthy or just surrounded by multiple students loans. All they need is just to strike it lucky once.
