Canadian Caregiver Scammer Caught and Convicted
It is always a little frightening reading about Canadian immigration fraud because there are just so many cases out there. We cannot repeat this enough, beware of people offering you jobs in Canada. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So make sure you do your research and don’t fall into the trap, like the hundreds of caregivers left stranded in the latest overseas nanny program scheme.
If you have heard of Rossana Lim, you will be glad to know that she has finally been sentenced for tricking hundreds of innocent job seekers out of their savings. Lim, a 55-year-old woman, dubbed a “criminal mastermind” was the brains behind a scam promising nannies and caregivers employment in Canada.
After a year-long investigation, authorities discovered Lim and her company, Platinum Care were using fake documents as employment offers for foreign workers. Thankfully, she was arrested in 2014, putting a stop to her exploitative ways.
Lim was known to bribe desperate Canadians for their personal identification information, like the homeless, drug addicts and alcoholics, with money so that she could falsify documents. We can hardly believe that this person used the needy to fuel her scam into tricking others who are similarly in need of jobs in Canada. Justice Rebecca Shamai rightfully found Lim guilty of defrauding the public of more than $5000 among other charges.
With information like Social Insurance Numbers and IDs, her company would create offers of employment to nannies and caregivers from the Philippines, U.K., Isreal and beyond. Though some of these were actual employers, the great majority were all fake.
This meant that Canadian newcomers would come to Canada under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to find that there is no job and no employer waiting for them on the other side. This left hundreds of people stranded in a foreign country destitute and without a support structure.
Those who could not find employment were further scammed into another scheme offering them food and lodging. The court found that every would-be nanny or caregivers paid between $3000 to $6000 to the company. Apart from losing this money, these people lost even more for their travels, not to mention the stress of packing up your life to move to Canada.
Unfortunately, cases like these are all too common. We are thankful that the Canadian authorities finally put a stop to her illegal practice but we know that there are still many out there doing the same or worse who have not yet been caught.
Our website exists to protect people from these kinds of scenarios. We regularly spend hours researching companies who make similar promises, like Lim, to expose their illegalities to the public. If you want to immigrate to Canada, you need to make sure that you are dealing with trustworthy professionals. We have an entire page on our website dedicated to trusted immigration agencies. Find them here and discover why we gave them our stamp of approval .
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