bhbloke

BA staffer running an immigration fraud for Indian citizens to claim asylum, netted him a pretty penny by the looks of it.

BA supervisor 'on the run in India' after '£3m immigration scam' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...re_article-top

HFHFFlyer

quite extraordinary - how on earth can someone have this kind of power without a cross check process being in place?

this went on for FIVE years.

flatlander

How are you going to arrange a cross check of ETA/visa/etc for every passenger with one that boards at Heathrow? That's many thousands a day and you would need two staff on many check-in desks to manage that. In fact, you'd need a cross check on most every passenger checkin to ensure that the staff aren't just waving people through in other ways, so that's double-staffing every counter. Is that really worthwhile?

Meanwhile, this chap may have netted £3M but at £25k each he was doing them at the rate of two a month, so I'm not surprised that a couple of extra asylum applications at the Canadian border every month took a while to track down to one guy in Heathrow.

Here's a link to avoid getting any Hate Mail on you, too: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/b...-b1141689.html

Kumulani

https://onemileatatime.com/news/brit...asylum-scheme/

Apologies if this was already discussed, I couldn't find in a search... In summary, looks like he was taking advantage of people with questionable immigration status in the UK. They would book a BA flight to Canada, then he would charge them £25,000 to mark them as having a Canadian visa when they actually didn't, so they would be allowed to board. Then, claim asylum upon arrival at the Canadian border. With the unusually large number of people arriving to Canada from London without visas, CBSA caught that there was something fishy going on and contacted UK Border Force, who determined that all these nonexistent "visas" had been checked by one person at Heathrow... After he was charged earlier this year he fled to India.

rockflyertalk

Some discussion here…

BA in the media | master thread

FlyingScientist

With or without valid visa?

flybymonkey

It is interesting how none of the news sources are exposing the persons name or have a picture. How did he even escape the country? I strongly suspect crap service that is the UK Border Force is involved here in some capacity.

Tobias-UK

There are many legal reasons why this may be the case, this is no doubt an ongoing investigation and the law enforcement agencies involved may still be looking for others who may be involved - both in the UK and elsewhere.

Saladman

In what way are Border Force involved when people leave the U.K.?

ManInExitRow

There is no proper checking over who leaves the UK. You really ought not to be able to leave the UK if you’re on bail. Perhaps we should give Fujitsu the contract to develop the IT.

compare with some countries where you have to pay unpaid parking fines before you can leave.

Tobias-UK

It all depends upon the bail conditions laid down by the police when he was released from custody. Whilst the press reports state this individual was arrested, there is no mention that he has yet been charged with any crime. In those situations bail conditions are often less restrictive, quite likely unconditional.

Saladman

Furthermore, even if he had been charged and any bail conditions had been set, they are recorded on the Police National Computer (and the courts database) which is not routinely accessed when someone leaves the U.K. Bail conditions can restrict travel and can be to surrender a passport, however he obviously wasn’t short of a few quid and so could probably obtain another one (illicitly).

Saladman

Very diplomatic! What you really mean is totally useless!

Tobias-UK

Not at all. Remember in the UK there is a presumption of innocence. Individuals will only be subject to bail conditions where the law allows it by necessity or the law requires it.

Saladman

Ha ha. As a practitioner I had a slightly different view! Even the CPS regarded it as useless. DV stuff was especially tricky. Anyway slightly OT.

I see the BA suspect took his partner (also a BA employee) with him.