DIBP has warned of ‘…a wave of scam calls currently taking place’ demanding immediate payment from visa holders for ‘errors’ in their documentation.

Scammers, impersonating immigration officials are making phone calls to visa holders and demanding the payment of ‘fines’ to fix 'errors' in their personal information, according to a recent post by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP).

The scammers apparently insist on immediate payment for ‘an alleged error committed by the intended victim” notes a DIBP spokesperson. Somehow, the scammer would authenticate their ‘authority’ by referring to the individuals personal details including date of birth and passport number and warn of errors in their personal information/circumstances like date of birth and require an immediate payment to fix those errors for a fee. The threat is that if payment is not made, the visa holder would be deported.

With email scams, the email address uses a government address but ends in .pn. For example, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Apparently, the scam starts off with the scammers obtaining peoples personal details via fake job advertisements. This would be followed up with emails or phone-calls demanding money transfers through Western Union.

The migration skills list and the occupation ceilings sets the limits on the number of permanent visas granted each year under Australia’s skilled migration programme. However, many of the trades skills quotas are not being met. It is not clear if there is insufficient interest from applicants or if people are not bothering to apply due to the high English Language requirement.

Eight months of the financial year have passed and DIBPs recently updated statistics on occupation ceilings show that out of some 160,000 possible invitations that DIBP can issue in each programme year, only about 19,402 invitations have been sent as at 25 February 2015. The statistics are listed here: http://www.immi.gov.au/Work/Pages/SkillSelect/SkillSelect.aspx#tab-4 . You will have to click the Occupational Ceilings tab to view the data.

Occupational ceilings limit how many invitations to apply are issued by the Department of Immigration each year for general skilled migration for a particular occupation. Generally, applicants with an Expression of Interest in occupational groups which have reached their ceiling will not be invited to apply for a visa but however will remain in the EOI pool for two years from the date of submission, or until they are selected to apply when a fresh quota is issued.

Occupational ceilings do not apply to Employer Sponsored or Business Innovation and Investment visa subclasses and have now also been removed for State or Territory Nominated, visa subclasses. Effectively this means that states can nominate occupations for Skilled Nominated Subclass 190 and Skilled Regional Subclass 489 visas even if the ceiling has been reached.

Based on DIBPs current statistics, over 90 per cent of the jobs have barely hit 50 per cent of their quota. In fact, more than half the jobs on the list that numbers 75 occupations, have barely hit 3 per cent of their quota.

Migration Alliance members have been in contact and have expressed the view that Migration Alliance should defend and protect it's name against ME Alliance Pty Ltd otherwise named Migration and Education Alliance, owned and operated by RMA Praveen Goyal.

If any RMAs, who are also solicitors are familiar with this area of law and would be able to advise us, we would be pleased to hear from you.  We would like to keep the work within the profession and amongst our members where possible.

As ME Alliance Pty Ltd is a small business, Migration Alliance has lodged an application with the Small Business Commissioner for mediation with ME Alliance Pty Ltd to try and request that Mr Goyal refrain from using 'Migration and Education Alliance' as his trading name.

A message has just been received from DIBP regarding ImmiAccount as follows:

"Can you please flag with Migration Alliance members that there will be an ImmiAccount outage from 2 til 9pm this Saturday.

We will put outage comms on the DIBP website but I wanted to advise you as well given the late notice – apologies for this but our IT colleagues were unable to confirm until today.