Kishore Kumar Kavuru Charged with H1-B Visa, Mail Fraud in the US

Kishore Kumar Kavuru, an American citizen of Indian origin was charged today on 10 counts of visa fraud and 10 counts of mail fraud, and if convicted he could face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for each count of visa fraud, with the additional prospect of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for each count of mail fraud. He was arrested on Friday and presented before US Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen.

 

Kavuru is a resident of Sunnyvale, California, and has been the owner of four consulting companies with names like Scopus Consulting Group, Inc., ITECH Analyst Corp, Infinity Methods Corp, and Orian Engineers Incorporated, that he used to obtain fake H1-B visas for foreign workers by providing false information about job opportunities that they were being hired to take up with the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security. In some cases, he would charge the workers several thousand dollars before agreeing to process their paperwork, which resulted in many of them having to wait for inordinate periods of time doing work other than what was promised because there were no such vacancies to begin with. In total, since 2007, Kavuru submitted 43 petitions for H1-B software engineers.

 

He had positioned himself as being a specialist at staffing for technology companies because he had a pool of software engineers who he could rotate through several temporary positions at will, as opposed to his competitors who had to wait for long periods of time to get the approvals that they needed by following the legal route.