By Michael Hill
Correspondent
With her broken English, she said a friend had referred her so she came to a Cranford office building looking for the University of Northern New Jersey to learn the language.
“I just want to go see it. I’m interested in it,” said a woman.
This was two hours after the Justice Department announced the university was a fake and the real lesson taught here was how to catch the “pay to stay” visa scam in action.
“These defendants arranged to obtain fake visas by having individuals enroll in a fake university,” said U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Paul Fishman.
A fake school with an online presence to arrest and charge 21 brokers and recruiters with conspiring to get bogus enrollment papers for a thousand foreign nationals from 26 countries seeking student visas to stay in the U.S. at a penthouse-level school that one building worker said just didn’t feel right.
“Its only employees were undercover HSI agents posing as corrupt administrators. The school had no instructors or educators. It had no curriculum and no actual classes or educational activities ever occurred there,” Fishman said.
Homeland Security Investigators and agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement even told one alleged recruiter the school was a sham.
“During a consensually recorded conversation with Yun, here’s what the undercover agents told him: ‘You know that none of these people are going to class? Just, you know, between us, you know, you’re good with that right? Make sure your clients are good with it, too. I don’t want anybody, you know, showing up at my doorstep thinking they’re going to be in my advanced calculus class or anything like that. That’s not going to happen right? We know this is just to maintain status.’ And the complaint alleges that Yun’s answer couldn’t have been clearer. Laughing, he admitted, ‘We’ve been doing this for years. No worries,'” Fishman said.
Investigators say one recruiter worried the feds were tracking visa seekers because of terrorism concerns.
“So she allegedly suggested to an undercover agent that it would be beneficial for the university to set up phony classrooms and have her clients sign fake attendance sheets,” Fishman said.
The Justice Department says payments to brokers and recruiters included thousands of dollars — in some cases directly to the school, kickbacks and a $7,000 watch.
The feds say they operated this fake university for about three years and when the word spread through the industry about what the university was really offering, it became popular.
“Once word got out, brokers descended on the school, clamoring to enroll their foreign student clients,” Fishman said.
ICE’s director says the agency will deal with the foreign nationals in administrative courts and what’s disturbing is those recruiters arrested knew nothing about and didn’t care about the intent of any of the foreign nationals recruited.