Travelers from Canada to U.S. are warned against visa appointment scams
American officials are seeing a growing demand for visitor visas from Canada — and an increasing number of people falling victim to online scams that promise faster access to U.S. visa appointments for an additional fee.
“Every day we receive inquiries from visa applicants who are victims,” said Aaron Luster, consul section chief at the U.S. Consulate General in Vancouver. “We estimate thousands and thousands of people have been ensnared in some of these scams and these extortion scams for their accounts.”
According to U.S. officials, unscrupulous agents would advertise that they can get an expedited visa appointment for a fee, then ask for an applicant’s U.S. visa application account information, take it over and block the person’s access.
“It charges a fee to someone for absolutely no value,” Julie Stufft, U.S. State Department deputy assistant secretary for visa services, told the Star. “It’s a complete scam.”
Authorities said these schemes take root in places where there’s a long wait for a visa appointment and are not unique to Canada, where the department website shows it can take as many as 900 calendar days for an interview for a visitor visa in Toronto, 777 days in Vancouver, 872 days in Calgary, 840 days in Halifax and 850 days in Ottawa.
They said there has been a marked increase in the demand — and appointment wait times — in Canada after the pandemic. Last year, the American embassy in Ottawa and its consulates in the country processed a record 230,000 visa appointments, surpassing the pre-COVID levels.
Stufft said Canadian citizens do not need a visa to travel to the U.S., yet Canada has become one of the biggest U.S. visa-adjudicating posts in the world.
“Generally you don’t have massive demand … and this is something that we’ve seen change over the years,” she said. “The demand we’re seeing in Canada is new for a country where Canadians and Americans can travel so freely on our very large shared land border.”
Stufft said she was not sure what drove the spike of applicants in need of a visitor visa to travel to the U.S. from Canada and would not comment on whether it has to do with the surge of permanent and temporary residents here, who require a visa to travel south of the border for fun, to see families, and attend conferences and meetings. Visas vary in length.
The number of permanent residents admitted yearly to Canada has risen significantly, from 341,000 in 2019 to 471,771 last year, while the temporary resident population present in the country such as study and work permit holders has soared from under a million to almost 2.8 million as of the end of June.
Luster said the American visa posts in Canada have increased staffing to meet the growing demand and introduced a new initiative to enhance its visa appointment scheduling service.
“We’ve created an ability to reach out to the applicants who have been waiting the longest” in cases of cancellations or because of higher staffing, said Luster, who emphasized that the department’s publicly posted wait time is the worst-case guess of the next available appointment for a location.
“We’re trying to give those people first priority at the new capacity that we created … That greatly reduces that wait.”
Earlier this year, officials also launched a pilot project to allow visa holders already in the U.S. to renew their visas from inside the U.S., to save them from having to leave to apply for the document in order to re-enter the U.S. The pilot is open to those who applied in Canada and will be made permanent in 2025.
“They were able to stay in the United States, mail in that visa and get it back in a very short time period from us and then have the security to leave the country again knowing that they have a valid visa,” Stufft said.
Not all visitor visa applicants are approved, and some of those who are refused may also try to enter illegally.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 191,602 “encounters” with migrants caught entering the U.S. without visas and proper travel documents at its northern land border from Canada in 2023, up from 135,607 in 2022 and just 37,186 in 2021, when travel restrictions were still in place in Canada and around the globe.
The U.S. and Canada have different visa requirements for different countries. A traveller may need a visa to the U.S. but not Canada, and vice versa. The inconsistency has contributed to irregular migration flows: those who are denied visas from their destined country may fly into the other that doesn’t require visas and then sneak through the porous land border.
Stufft would not comment on whether there’s a need to better align the two countries’ visa requirements to plug the gap.
“There is incredible collaboration between our two governments at these border crossings and just amazingly professional work on a very hard job and a very large land border being done by our colleagues there,” she said.
“From the visa process, our job is to screen those folks who want to come in with a U.S. visa and enter the United States legally.”
This article was first reported by The Star
