US fake university: India anger after students arrested

[malaise]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47106199
<snip>
India has made a diplomatic protest to the US after 129 Indian students were arrested for enrolling in a fake university.

The University of Farmington, advertised as based in Michigan state, was run by undercover agents from the Department of Homeland Security to expose "pay-to-stay" immigration fraud.

Prosecutors say those who enrolled knew that the facility would be illegal.

However, Indian officials say the students may have been duped.

On Saturday, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) issued the protest to the US embassy in Delhi, expressing concern over the arrests and demanding consular access to those detained.

[customerserviceguy]

1. There's an old saying

"You cannot cheat an honest man."

[MichMan]

2. The facility was a single office building

It was not set up as an online university. There were never any classes and it should have been inherently obvious there weren't going to be any. All they had was a website and Facebook page.

[Amishman]

4. Yup, they had to know this wasn't legitimate

Our immigration system needs some serious reform, and I am not talking about our poor treatment of refugees.

H1B program is broken with companies like Tata Consultancy bring in essentially indentured servants to be overworked and exploited by corporations, while legitimate specialist needs are unable to be filled as the giants eat up all the H1B visas. I briefly consulted on a project where we needed someone really good with OCaml. Couldn't find it, but we knew it was better known in Europe. We tried to find a partner to help us bring in someone, but got nowhere. At the same I've seen tons of examples of pretty standard development jobs being done by visa'ed devs where a US dev would have been easy to find.

Real University graduates can't stay but scam programs (like what was being mimicked here) can run their cons with near impunity.

[MineralMan]

3. Entrapment.

Despicable.

[Igel]

5. We have an animal trap.

One of the non-lethal kind.

We have a cat in the neighborhood that will not be trapped. I set the trap out for her, another cat was caught, and since then both of those cats know that this wire contraption is dangerous.

There's another that's just suspicious. We can leave the trap out for weeks and only feed birds and fire ants. And probably mice.

If all you're told is that you can get a student visa with no classes, no classroom, no professor, no work, and that doesn't strike you as a scam, I have a piece of land I'm selling for $5k with no buildings, no deed, no property taxes, and no address I think you should buy. If you want to see it, it's a few miles north of Wichita on I-10 N where it meets I-5 business eastbound.

Seriously, if they're that stupid--that's the Indian government's nationalist claim--they will go to court and the case will be thrown out because of the defendant's incapacity to participate in their own defense.