Scam Alert!!! Skilled Worker
So, if this turns out to be genuine, then I will have a real egg-on-a-face situation. But I think on this occasion I might take that risk at the face of this overwhelming evidence of fraud.
As a lawyer, I thought I had already seen an encyclopaedic number of variations of fraud, starting from the “Good day, you are the beneficiary” to a more sophisticated, really tailored approach like intercepting genuine communications between a student and a university, and issuing the poor students with a fake Confirmation of Studies (CAS) asking, of course for the “tuition fees”.
And to be honest, until today, I was in the middle of writing my next blog on how real people posing as immigration solicitors or advisers might scam you with legal services and how to look out for those. But I had to put this up before all else when I received a genuine visa assistance request from a genuine client who unfortunately received this letter and was about to engage my services on the strength of this!
What makes me think this is less than genuine? Well, so many to pick at, and you would see some of these easily too, but here are some of the more blatant ones:
A letter of invitation is a weird term. Normally, an offer of employment would be given to an international employee for the purpose of a Skilled Worker visa.
An offer of Employment is less important than a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS). Anyone being engaged from outside the U.K. must first be given a CoS from their UK 🇬🇧 employer who has currently valid sponsor licence.
If you are genuinely hired by a sponsor, a CoS is either given or it isn’t. And a visa is only granted when you make an application to the Home Office in the usual way. No other letter in the world, whether it’s addressed directly to the ambassador or another, would bypass all these requirements and get you the visa you need on the basis of a letter alone.
As in this example, a genuine company is used by another to impersonate. You could check as much as you want but as long as a genuine company is being impersonated, you will not find anything out of kilter on your search. Even the address used is accurate.
But there are blindingly obvious points of note - of course the cut & Paste graphics are all faded. Different fonts are all over the place. English can be grammatically incorrect (but this one can be hard for non-native speakers to catch). But we all know how to spell Cameroon right?
Finally, Offering “Free Taxes”…?! Come on 😒🤷
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🇬🇧 🇰🇷