Visa applications by South Africans are likely to be more thoroughly examined following the recent visas scam uncovered in London, the United Kingdom High Commission said in Pretoria on Friday.
”Applications will be more carefully scrutinised and will be treated with an element of suspicion,” said spokesperson Sheppard who believed the story of ”innocent South African students being taken for a ride” was a little simplistic.
He said an applicant must know that the institution they claimed to be studying at was bogus or not, and if they did not, they would know shortly after classes started.
”To say they were totally innocent and fleeced of their money by unscrupulous criminals is not credible. Many must have been aware of the fraud and used it as a way to stay in the country after their two-year holiday working visa had expired,” he said.
But Sheppard said UK authorities would not be totally unsympathetic explaining that each case would be treated individually.
”We are not going to round them all up and fly them back to South Africa in a couple of Boeings,” he said.
There are those, he said, who did realise they had signed up to a bogus institution and had swapped to another, but their visa application would still contain the name of the bogus college.
Sheppard believed South Africans had been targeted because of their comparative wealth and numbers compared to other travellers from the continent.
”The South African community in London probably got to hear of the visas and thought it an easy way of extending their stay in the country,” he said.
He said that finding all those bogus students would not be that easy as the people who issued the visas did not keep lists of addresses.
Many, he said, would probably only come to the attention of the authorities once the visa came up for renewal.
Police spokesperson Director Sally de Beer said on Friday there had been no developments in the case since the 20 UK and naturalised citizens were arrested by British police on Sunday.
Members of the SA Police Service and the London Metropolitan have been working closely together since the investigation started five months ago.
Property in Durban, allegedly belonging to a criminal syndicate involved in the scheme, was expected to be seized by the Assets Forfeiture Unit and handed to the Metropolitan Police.
”The logistics of this are still to be sorted out,” she said.
The scheme involved providing foreigners, mostly South Africans, with documents falsely claiming they were studying at colleges around London. – Sapa