INTCAS CEO, Zakaria Mahmood, has made a comical statement from his
sinking ship about this whistleblower website. In a desperate attempt,
this crumbling bogus college recruitment fraudsters with long track
records of immigration crimes and documents forgeries have come out
finally from hiding. Obviously, their intention was improper in design
and miserably failed in execution. INTCAS CEO, Zakaria MahmoodOur
demands are clear and simple. We are asking for nothing but the truth.
Zakaria Mahmood who uses “The Board of Directors of INTCAS” as a
preferred nickname for his failing one-man show, also known as INTCAS,
refers the facts on our website as “Fake Articles and Videos”. It is
hard to imagine how INTCAS can dispute facts (for example the shocking
videos exposing Zakaria Mahmood’s criminal operations in the Middle
East).
The whole tune of INTCAS statement shows how scared and
desperate Zakaria Mahmood is becoming. In the whole statement, he fails
to address the question that simply “why” such people are devoting their
precious time and hard-earned cash to expose INTCAS corruptions and
frauds. Every single person would say, maybe they are telling the truth.
It is clear that no one chooses to start a whistleblower website and
get involved to expose such a dangerous Pakistani criminal gang.
Thankfully,
Zakaria Mahmood and his gang have upset a lot of hardworking men and
women and they attract literally no sympathy. The level of their
criminalities both in the UK and Pakistan cannot be swept under the
carpet. We have established a wide network of people who have been
deceived and ripped off by INTCAS and Zakaria Mahmood.
Our Demands
We
would like to ask a few questions publicly. And it would be great if
“the Board of Directors of INTCAS” could make a comment on that. Is
Zakaria Mahmood ready to testify under oath if he has ever:
Forged any documents to delude the UKBA immigration system in order to obtain Highly Trusted Sponsor accreditation?
Been involved in running and facilitating fraudulent and bogus colleges recruitment?
Used
genuine CAS numbers to issue a visa for bogus students even though he
knew their intention was to claim asylum when they arrive in Britain?
Sold fake documents (including passports, visa stamps, IETLS certificates) through his agents in Pakistan?
Sexually harassed and taken advantage of vulnerable female staff in London?
Hushed staff, who knew about sexual harassments of asylum seekers?
We appreciate if INTCAS has any comments on them.
This website will stay here until we are fully paid back every single penny Zakaria Mahmood has stolen from us.
Zakaria
Mahmood and everyone assisting him should be aware. This time they have
upset the wrong people. They will be exposed. “You ain’t seen nothing
yet”.
Students been recruited by INTCAS were arrested for obtaining fake visa from a college has been shut down eight years ago.
The
UK Border Agency forces swooped in and arrested 30 Pakistani bogus
students recruited by an immigration fraud gang called INTCAS (based in
Croydon) on an immigration raid in Birmingham. Keith Walls, a UKBA
spokesperson, indicated that the individuals, four Bangladeshi and
twenty Pakistani nationals, have been placed under removal proceedings
and that the agency will seek to keep them in custody pending the
outcome of legal proceedings.
UKBA hatched the scheme to unveil
foreign students who knowingly recruited by INTCAS in order to enroll in
fake schools in a “pay-to-stay” racket designed to maintain their
student visa status. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who announced
the case and the charges said that the UK Border Agency sought to expose
several immigration frauds conducted by INTCAS.
The
nationwide sweep, which took place across the UK, covering cities like
London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, was one of the largest
operations in recent times. It came in the wake of several indictments
where eight individuals, mostly Pakistani, were charged in a similar
visa fraud scheme.
UKBA agent who is investigating INTCAS for
another immigration crime case, reported that, unlike the 30 foreign
students who were arrested on immigration fraud charges, the eight
individuals were criminally charged with conspiracy to commit several
visa frauds and harboring aliens for profit.
According to the
UKBA, the students had immigrated to the UK legally but then had
transferred to the Sinclair Adamson Business School (which has been
dissolved right years ago) so that they could get extensions on the
visas and also get to work.
Prior to the arrests, INTCAS had set
up a fake university, Sinclair Adamson Business School, which lured
foreign students to apply and transfer their credits so that they could
get visa extensions. INTCAS staff even created a website for this fake
college. A quick search on company house indicates this so-called
college is owned by a Pakistani origin INTCAS CEO, Zakaria Mahmood. The
college registered in 2011 and got shut down under numerous immigration
breaches on the same year.
Subhan Hussein, an immigration lawyer
based in Croydon, told the press that, “the fake college had lured and
hooked students by promising to give them credits for all their previous
master’s programs.” He said Sinclair Adamson Business School had
offered to allow the students to work while being enrolled, which was
not unusual. Therefore, the students had imagined it was a legitimate
and authorised institution, complete with a work programme and a type of
Tier4 visa.
Officials of the UKBA claimed that the students knew
they were participating in an illegal racket. But Abid Hussain, a
Croydon-based solicitor with the same firm, said that “it was not true”
and that “there were specific institutions that had advanced degree
programmes with practical training right from the onset. They allow
students to enrol even when they spend the bulk of their time working.
It appears the students were scammed by Zakaria Mahmood the INTCAS CEO
and his team of agents back in Pakistan.”
Zakaria Mahmood, INTCAS CEOAccording
to the UKBA investigator, INTCAS used very questionable methods to get
foreign students to sign up with the fake institution. Several numbers
of the students implicated in the crackdown had completed legitimate
master’s programmes across the UK and were only waiting for approvals
for specialty work visas. Therefore, they had enrolled in the university
as a stop-gap measure.
Foreign students are usually granted
“Tier4” visas to undertake their studies in the UK. They must maintain
their legal immigration status by enrolling in a university that is
accredited by the UKBA. But according to the UKBA, both INTCAS and
Sinclair Adamson did not even offer courses and that the students were
using the programme as a way to obtain employment in the UK.
After
the arrests, the UKBA shut down the website that had been created for
Sinclair Adamson Business School. The website now informs anyone
affected to get in touch with their local UKBA Investigations office.
Meanwhile,
in Islam Abad, Jahan Kiyani, a student recruitment agent, confirmed
that INTCAS management team and Zakaria Mahmood who is INTCAS CEO in
person, was well aware of the operation and the situation it had caused.
“We are well aware of this incident, and we are ascertaining more
details from our team in London,” he said.
Our whistle blower on INTCAS Immigration Fraud has recently accessed
INTCAS main man's mobile phone, Zakaria Mahmood, and has found these
shocking footage of asylum seekers sending their videos from their
illegal departure in Pakistan to INTCAS thanking them for facilitating
it.
Why I resigned from INTCAS after five years of forging documents and processing sham student visas
MY NAME IS Raj Ahmed. I am in the middle of a fallout with my former
friend Zakaria Mahmood on INTCAS multiple immigration frauds and visa
forgeries. An irreparable fallout it seems, given his insistence to go
on running INTCAS as it has been running for the last five years. He
wants us to keep at it, “for just a little longer,” he says. According
to him, we are doing great, which, to some degree, is true. But I cannot
do this anymore. It has been five years and I just handed in a formal
resignation. Unfortunately, none of INTCAS management and shareholders
is aware of this situation and this is what has been hidden from the
INTCAS board. Zakaria Mahmood, of course, wouldn’t hear of it and had
asked to meet me immediately. Here’s why I am leaving this lucrative
job:
You see, every young person now yearns to add a multi-cultural
dimension to their studies, careers, or their lives. They want to be
more world-ready and better prepared for a globalized corporate world.
Because they are keen to go across their home borders for an education
or a livelihood, they often land in the hand of a college recruiter.
Recruitment agents such as Zakaria Mahmood and myself.
For close to five years, Zakaria Mahmood and I have been recruiting
students to the UK. Hundreds of ‘students’ by this time. Only, the
students are not really students. They come to work and stay in the UK.
Normally, you just don’t move into a new country, and start over, and
settle down. Certainly not the UK. But with Zakaria Mahmood and INTCAS,
all things were possible.
For the past five years, INTCAS (initially Sinclair Adamson Business School), was based in East London (and then moved to Croydon), could
loophole any legal barriers and help anyone secure a visa in the UK.
That is, anyone who could come up with the fee. Word got around pretty
fast in first year of operations, especially within the Asian
communities. At some point, we seemed to be solely focused on helping
our countrymen in Pakistan. Zakaria Mahmood would at times allude to the
fact that we’re doing a world of good for people by helping them get a
livelihood in the UK. Zakaria Mahmood and I were originally from
Pakistan, from Rawalpindi and Taxila respectively, even though we met in
London.
I first ran into Zakaria Mahmood about eight years earlier, during a
Pakistani cultural night. He’d gone to Kings College with my cousin
Waqar and had just set up an organization called Sinclair Adamson
Business School in 2011 which offered various support services to
international students. They rebranded a few years later to AMPLAS and
then finally to INTCAS. I’d just completed my studies and was due to
head back to Pakistan in about 6 months. So, when Zakaria Mahmood
offered a temporary job at the agency, I naturally jumped at the
opportunity.
Two months into the job, I received one of several ‘perks’ of the
job. On condition that I commit myself to the job, Zakaria Mahmood
helped me to secure a work visa extension. But as it would quickly turn
out, it was not just a job ‘perk,’ it was a live demonstration of the
kind of services we would be providing for many immigrants who were
already in the UK and others from Pakistan and other parts of the world.
Later, we would haul in ‘students’ from Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan,
Turkey, Iran and even Nigeria.
So, this is the simplified version of how it worked; to secure a
genuine TIER 4 student visa in the UK, one needs to take an English test
(TOEIC), have a bank statement as proof of support (since non-EU
students are not allowed to work), and a genuine letter of admission
from a recognized college institution. At the time, the UK Home Office
had to process nearly 500,000 visas every year, about half of which are
student visas. There were bound to be cracks and loopholes in the
system. These cracks and loopholes became the foundations of INTCAS.
“Neat and clean” or “process-oriented” Zakaria Mahmood would always
say, “and everybody goes home happy” he would add. Zakaria Mahmood had a
charm that seemed to pacify even the most stubborn conscience. A few
weeks spent around him, and you would be ready to lie with the Bible on
your right hand and the Quran in your left hand. Within a year, I had
become one of his trusted employees though there were only five of us,
including Zakaria Mahmood. By the second year, I was only reporting to
him and I was pretty much running the office.
To secure a visa, the first step was to take an English test, that
is, the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). This is
an absolute requirement for students who come from countries that don’t
have English as their first language, which is pretty much
three-quarters of all the countries in the world. But at INTCAS, we
could just about guarantee a successful test to anyone who didn’t speak a
word English. For about £750, we could arrange for someone to take the
test on behalf of our client. We’d bypass any surveillance or scrutiny
and ensure our clients passed any ETS exams. A few days later, they
would get an original certificate from TOEIC, a body approved by the
UKBA. TOEIC is one of the most trusted English testing bodies, and which
runs nearly fifty million tests around the world each year.
Of course, one needs more than an English certificate to live and
study in the UK. You first need an academic background, which we could
provide in case our you didn’t have one. This would normally be a bogus,
lower level college or even high school certificate. Next in line, one
needed an admission letter to a recognized college, and which Zakaria
Mahmood could obtain with relative ease through INTCAS. In fact, we even
afforded the students the luxury of choosing from a select list of
A-grade or B-grade college institutions. This, of course, was a bogus
admission letter (from the colleges close to getting shut down for
immigration breaches) and our clients only had to attend the institution
once a month or so, or not at all in most cases.
Finally, every applicant had to produce proof of sustenance in the
form of a bank statement showing sufficient funds. Therefore, students
would, bring in their original bank statements with just a few pounds in
them and collect another statement showing several thousand pounds.
“Look! We have made you instantly rich!” we would often tease our
clients as we presented the new bogus bank statement to them.
Each year, nine out of ten of our walk-in clients, who were not
really “walk-in clients” as they had been recommended by previous
clients, were clear that they wanted to stay in the UK. Most of them
were men with an Asian background from 25 to 40 years old. They wanted a
visa so that they could work illegally. “Until I figure out something
in the future,” they would often say. Zakaria Mahmood was, of course,
extremely ambitious and with an entrepreneurial bent. Having spent a
long time in London, he knew only too well about the great demand for
visa processing support services. Zakaria Mahmood, with his vehicle
INTCAS, stepped in seeking to meet this demand, knowing how lucrative it
could get. He was right. We’d sometimes collect as much as £7,000 in
fees from one client.
Naturally, Zakaria Mahmood sought to expand the business. So, we got
agents in Pakistan and Turkey who’d help recruit ‘students’ who wanted
to come to the UK. The scrutiny and the systems back in Pakistan were,
of course, nothing compared to the ones in the UK. Therefore, Zakaria
Mahmood and INTCAS had an eye for the bottom line and seemed to favour
the lowest costs of doing business. We even used fake passports and visa stamps, which were cheaper to acquire, and sometimes did not even
bother with original documents, preferring to bribe our way through all
the potential hurdles.
I’ll never forget one our clients, a miss Kiran Chowdhury who phoned
the office late one afternoon, frantically asking for Zakaria Mahmood.
She said she had been given the contact by one of INTCAS agents in
Pakistan, and that she had to speak to Zakaria Mahmood as a matter of
urgency. Zakaria Mahmood would later inform me that she had been
arrested at Lahore International Airport with a fake passport and that
“it was her fault, that woman”. According to him, she had not followed
all the instructions and that “she deserved it”. That kind of aloofness
and detachment would make my stomach turn. But I knew better than to
make further enquiries. All payments and fees had to be made in advance.
And INTCAS had almost no refunds policy if the clients got caught.
Zakaria Mahmood would always say that we had to be fully compensated for
our efforts and for the risk.
“Look, Raj, just where are you going to go, mate? We are doing pretty
good here,” Zakaria Mahmood was saying before I left the office. “See,
we are straightening everything. Soon enough we’ll clean up every mess,”
he says, referring to the small efforts to offer legitimate services.
These, of course, were often eclipsed with all our bogus dealings. What
he couldn’t come out and say to my face, and that we both knew to be the
absolute truth, was the fact that the few legitimate things we’d done
were just cover-ups. They were the nice, shining coat that covered the
rot on the inside of the organization.
Five years is quite a long time to reawaken a conscience, and which
even Zakaria Mahmood alluded, but I couldn’t bring myself to work
another day at INTCAS. In the last two years, I had secretly followed up
on a few of our clients. While most of them got absorbed in the system,
some of them were not quite lucky. They faced immigration violation
charges, deportation and led lives of quiet desperation. I had almost a
year to go on my visa and would have to decide my next course of action.
But it would certainly not be with INTCAS.
