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Indian American linked to H-1B lottery rigging fraud
Reddy's operation involved submitting multiple applications for the same individuals using different company names to boost their chances in the lottery.
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Indian American Kandi Srinivasa Reddy has been linked with visa fraud in a report published by Bloomberg.
According to the report, the H-1B visa lottery is being manipulated and exploited by staffing and outsourcing companies.
Reddy, who arrived in the U.S. in the early 2000s and earned a master’s degree,founded his own company, Cloud Big Data Technologies LLC in 2013.
Bloomberg’s investigation found that Reddy submitted multiple H1-B applications for the same individuals using different company names to boost their chances in the lottery. He used several entities, including Cloud Big Data Technologies LLC and Machine Learning Technologies LLC, and others with similar names and overlapping addresses to submit over 3,000 entries for the same workers.
In one year alone, Reddy's firms secured over 300 successful H-1B applications, a substantial increase compared to previous years. The report further reveals that after obtaining H-1B visas, Reddy’s company leased the workers to corporations such as Meta Platforms Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc., according to visa applications.
The company's ads advertised that it collected 20 percent to 30 percent of the workers' salaries, which could amount to $15,000 or more annually per worker.
Lucas Garritson, a Texas lawyer representing Reddy, told Bloomberg that several of the visas issued to Reddy’s companies were contested by the USCIS for alleged abuse of the lottery system. However, he noted that the agency had not adhered to the correct procedures for banning the activity and lacked concrete evidence proving that Reddy’s companies had violated the rules.
Initially, H-1B visas were allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. However, due to excessive demand, the USCIS transitioned to a lottery system with a cap of 85,000 visas. Each year, the lottery randomly selects names from a pool of applicants, which has nearly doubled in recent years, resulting in increasingly slim chances of securing a visa.
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