UK visa ‘scam’ : Migrant carers from Kerala await justice

Arun George used his half-working life to put together £15, 000 ($ 19, 460 ) in savings to hire his wife as a carer in the UK.

But he completely lost it in a matter of weeks.

The managers of Alchita Care were given the money in late 2023 by Mr. George, who was not named because his family didn’t want to be identified with their little community because she felt ashamed that she had left without a job.

The secret inpatient care home in Bradford, Alchita Care, which sponsored his family’s visa, has provided documentation of the payments made to the BBC. He did it at the whim of a local representative in his small Kerala town in southern India.

The couple was encouraged to put their trust in their savings and get such a risk because their child who has specific needs was promised a better life for them. However, when they arrived in the UK, there was no employment.

They made up mistakes, but we kept chasing the treatment home. After I pleaded with them, they forced my wife to complete some paid training and gave her only three weeks of employment, according to Mr. George. We left India a few months later because we weren’t continue.

Mr. George claims that the company has defrauded him and that the suffering has materially hampered him by at least ten years. One of the thousands of Keralans seeking employment in the UK who have been abused by employers, care homes, and middlemen is his home, which is just one more.

Most people today have given up on receiving cash or justice.

Alchita Care in Bradford has never responded to the BBC’s inquiries. The Home Office removed their sponsor license next time, which allows treatment homes to challenge certificates of funding to international attention workers applying for visas.

However, at least three different care workers, who had moved from Kerala and sent thousands of dollars to Alchita Care, testified to us that the work they had been promised didn’t come true.

One of them, who is still present in the UK, claimed that because of his precarious situation, he had been relying on “bread and butter” from charity shops for the past several decades.

Similar to Mr. George, Sridevi ( who is not her real name ) claims Alchita Care paid her £15,000 for a card funding. She spent another £3, 000 to get to the UK in 2023.

She is afraid of facing family and friends from whom she borrowed money to travel to India because she is unable to go back.

She said,” I find it difficult to actually pay for my meals and book.” She claims that her work is a far cry from the steady eight-hour job she was promised. She occasionally works from 4am to 9pm, driving from one patient’s household to another, but only gets paid for the short time she spends with the person and not the entire move.

Thousands of Keralan nurses are thought to have been exploited after the government added care staff to the UK’s deficit job roster during Covid, determined to immigrate to the UK every year. As long as they were sponsored, persons could be recruited from abroad.

The maintenance employee immigration was a golden ticket for some because they could bring their families with them to a better life.

Mayor of Cambridge and a part of the Labour party, Baiju Thittala, claimed to have represented at least 10 of these patients over the past three centuries.

However, he said, it has been extremely difficult to pursue justice because of the cross-border character of these predatory schemes. Quite frequently, he added, sufferers have paid for services provided by intermediaries or care homes outside of India, which causes” control problems.”

Second, doctors are pricey, and the majority of care workers, who are already deeply debated, can’t afford to fight it out in court.

According to Thittala, at least 1, 000 to 2, 000 Keralans who were directly or indirectly the survivors of these methods are still living in the UK.

Additionally, there are thousands of people who have lost money before they can also leave their homes in Kerala’s towns.

The BBC spoke to about 30 people in the town of Kothamangalam who had lost millions of dollars trying to get a treatment card that allows experts to work in the social treatment sector.

All of them claimed that a representative, Henry Poulos and his company Grace International in the UK and India, had been robbing them of their life saving through false job offers and funding words.

Some of them also claimed that Mr. Poulos also forced them to travel 2, 500 kilometers to Delhi for visa appointments, which were non-existent.

Shilpa, who resides in the city of Alleppey, claimed to have taken out a bank loan with a 13 % interest rate to pay Mr. Poulos, who had given her a false sponsorship certificate.

She told the BBC,” I thought the UK may give a good prospect to my three sons, but today I am struggling to pay their college fees.”

“I have lost everything. My wife had left her job in Israel so that we could move to the UK,” said another victim, Binu, breaking down. He made a comfortable £1,500 with his wife in Israel but has now been forced to take his children out of private school in Kerala because there’s no money anymore.

Neither Mr Poulos nor Grace International responded to the BBC, despite repeated attempts to get in touch with them. The police in Kothamangalam said Mr Poulos was absconding in the UK, and they had sealed his local offices after receiving complaints from six people.

The past Conservative government in the UK acknowledged last year that there was” clear information” that maintenance workers were being offered permits under false pretences and paid far below the minimum wage for their job.

In addition to increasing the minimum wage, the rules were tightened in 2024 to minimize its use. People are now unable to adopt children, making it less appealing.

In the treatment industry, about 450 permits that employers could hire overseas workers have been suspended since July 2022 have been removed.

Sponsors are now also expressly prohibited by the Home Office from disclosing the cost of the sponsor license fee or related operational fees to potential employees as of the start of this year.

However, leading police officers in Kerala told the BBC that they were still conducting inquiries into these incidents in India and may work with Interpol to take action if needed.

Justice is still elusive and largely a distant dream for the hundreds of people who have already been exploited, though.