More than 10,000 foreign student acceptance letters may be fake, says top Canadian immigration official

The strict verification as per the officials was introduced after a group of international students applying for permanent residence faced deportation last year

Canadian authorities have flagged off more than 10,000 fraudulent student acceptance letters in 2024, according to a top immigration official in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

Bronwyn May, director-general of the International Students Branch at the Immigration Department, told MPs last week that since IRCC started verifying acceptance letters from colleges and universities in the past year, officials have “intercepted more than 10,000 potentially fraudulent letters of acceptance.” (Unsplash)

According to a recent report in The Globe and Mail, stringent verification by IRCC discovered scores of would-be foreign students who said they had a genuine place to study may have been attaching a fraudulent acceptance letter to their application to get into the country.

Reason for stricter checks:

The strict verification of documents as per the officials was introduced after a group of international students applying for permanent residence faced deportation last year. This happened because an unlicensed immigration consultant in India had submitted fake acceptance letters with their applications for study permits, mentioned the report.

Bronwyn May, director-general of the International Students Branch at the Immigration Department, as per The Globe and Mail report, told MPs last week that since IRCC started verifying acceptance letters from colleges and universities in the past year, officials have “intercepted more than 10,000 potentially fraudulent letters of acceptance.” She said 93 percent of the 500,000 acceptance letters attached to study permit applications the department checked in the past 10 months had been verified as genuine by a college or university. But 2 percent were not authentic. While some applicants had their place cancelled by a college or university, in other cases, colleges and universities failed to respond to questions about whether the letters offering applicants a place to study were genuine.

Ottawa launched a probe into 2,000 suspicious cases involving students from India, China and Vietnam in 2023 and it found that around 1,485 had been issued bogus documents to come to Canada by immigration consultants abroad. Many were refused entry to Canada after their letters of acceptance from colleges were found to be fake, but others had already arrived, reported The Globe and Mail.