Fake foreign job offers on the rise in Sri Lanka
Foreign employment scams and fake recruitment issues are on the rise in Sri Lanka with more people looking online for overseas jobs and some of them falling victims to unscrupulous agencies which exploit mostly the poor domestic workers.
A Special Investigation Unit has been established in the Foreign Employment Bureau (FEB) in accordance with an approval of Cabinet of Ministers, to tackle this menace.
The main task of this unit is probing various irregularities in the field of foreign employment including fake jobs’ or ‘job scams’, FEB sources revealed.
Thirty six employees including 17 police officers are attached to this unit. Some 2452 complaints had been lodged to the unit in 2018 and 1,364 out of these complaints had been probed and finalised, a government audit inspection revealed.
Measures have been taken to refer 322 complaints to the Police Stations and 1088 complaints were being investigated by 31 December 2018, the audit inspection report highlighted.
The unit has received 274 complaints related to financial frauds amounting to Rs. 108.46 million committed by promising to provide foreign employment opportunities during the period of 13 months in the year 2017 and 2018, a top official of the FEB said.
Those complaints had been referred to police stations after getting statements at the unit as it was not possible to find written confirmations for such promises given for the provision of foreign employment, he added.
Following up activities had not been carried out in relation to those complaints and it was not possible to minimise such irregularities which occurred in the field of foreign employment merely by setting up the unit, he said.
A group of fraudsters had scammed a number of people online and taken large sums of money from them promising employment in Cyprus, he
disclosed.
In another case, a fraudulent company had carried out a business of issuing air tickets and providing foreign jobs for several people who had to pay a sum of Rs. 1.2 million in order to gain employment in Japan.