Canada announces measures to prevent study permit fraud

The Canadian government has announced more checks and measures to prevent study permit fraud among international students, and it says the moves will also protect genuine students from being scammed.

This comes after hundreds of students were revealed to have fake acceptance letters that allowed them into Canada earlier this year, and dozens of them had been defrauded.

The government says it is establishing a list of recognized institutions that it says will set a higher standard for services, support, and outcomes for students and will benefit from expedited study permit processing.

The new process is also intended to reassess post-grad work-permit criteria to better meet the needs of the labour market in Canada, and it’ll require schools to vouch for students directly to confirm that their acceptance letters are real.

Vancouver East NDP MP Jenny Kwan says these are all good moves that should have been happening already, but she’s concerned for the dozens of students involved in the scam earlier this year who are still waiting for their fraud hearings to play out.

“The students are still very anxious,” Kwan said. “They’re still very worried about what this all means for them, and they’re still in limbo. I would have thought that more progress would have been made. This was back in April when all these cases surfaced.”

The federal government says it has reviewed 103 cases so far. 63 of which were found to be genuine students while 40 were not.