It has now become a common thing in the UK for an international student to be scammed of their money, and it isn’t just one common type of scam. Students are scammed in different ways.
It sometimes becomes hard to defend against the scam attacks when there are so many people using so many ways to scam students. The UK has a few of the most famous universities, and that is why it is easy to find a lot of people there.
Scammers love targeting students from the UK because it becomes convenient for them to get lost in the crowd and never be found. A lot of money scams are carried out with such precision that it almost becomes impossible for the UK police to find the scammers.
Types of Scams
Visa Scams:
Visa scams are one of the most common kinds of money scams that is reported in the UK. It is a straightforward scam for scammers to choose since there are a lot of students who came from other countries do not know a lot about how the system works in the UK or are even aware of the scams when they are new.
Asian people are the favourite group of people for these scammers to target. Mostly Chinese and then Indians. There is a reason behind it. These frauds think that somehow, Chinese students must be wealthy, and even if they lost a little money, it won’t hurt them.
They don’t think about the possibility that the student they are scamming may be well under a student loan debt. They think it is okay to justify what they do use this reason.
What these frauds will do is they will call the student they have obtained information about. They will call from a number which will look the same as the number mentioned in the official site of the UK’s Home Office.
They have several other ways to make the student believe that they are actual officials from the government by acting professional and posing as the police or sometimes even Chinese police for Chinese students. They have all the necessary information about the student from either other sources or their stolen laptops or smart-phones.
These fraud people will ask the student to pay a fine for some mistake on their visa application or their passport and threaten them that if they don’t pay the fine, they will be deported back to their home country.
It is almost so believable from the manner they talk and the information they have that it becomes hard to distinguish between the real and fake authorities and till the time the victims understand that they have been robbed and report the incident, the scammers are either gone or removed every trace of their fraud from the system. Students should never share their details or transfer any amount of money till the time their universities have advised them to do so.
Rogue Landlords:
This is another kind of scam that local people or landlords of the UK trick students with. It is not exactly like an illegal scam, but an unethical action. For students who are new and don’t know the standard or average amount of rent that usually a student pays, some of the landlords use this to their advantage for earning a few extra Euros.
They charge these students hefty sums of money for a short period of stay. Even though this is not an illegal activity, it is, in a sense, scam only.
Any student travelling to the UK for studies should know and research the usual amount of rent students pay there and find themselves a cheap place to stay since according to stats, a large percentage of the money that students spend in the UK is for rent only.
There are also scholarships and fundings available from private institutions for students who cannot obtain a student loan from the banks in the UK.
The government of UK is trying to spread the awareness for these visa scams mainly because most of the victims don’t even know such scams exist in the first place so that students who come to their country aren’t robbed anymore.
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