Officials are warning young people applying for a working holiday visa for Australia not to try to disguise their identities in an attempt to stay longer in the country.
The working holiday visa is one of the most popular for younger people for an extended stay in Australia as it allows them to work for part of their trip.
The visa is available to nationals from 19 countries and can be used to visit, study and work in Australia for up to a year. If a Working Holiday visa holder spends three months or more doing designated approved work in regional Australia during their visit, they may be eligible for a second Working Holiday visa for an additional year.
But the Department of Immigration is cracking down after uncovering a series of frauds where some visitors were making changes to their identity in an attempt to stay longer and secure more work.
It is now using an innovative automated form of discreet profiling that checks every application for a Working Holiday visa after some were found making changes to their true identities in their home countries in an attempt to subvert Australian law and to travel a second time without having completed the regional work requirement. Some were even attempting to travel on a third Working Holiday visa under a new identity.
‘In one case, we discovered an applicant who had been able to acquire five Working Holiday visas illegally in this way until we detected the fraud, ‘ said the department’s director of analytics and risk tiering, Klaus Felsche.
Using new profiling techniques that do not require visa applicants to provide any additional information as part of the application process, the department has identified, cancelled or refused more than 130 visas by applicants engaged in identity fraud.
The department has been monitoring the fraud offline from visa processing systems to ensure a high level of accuracy and to ensure that the visa application experience of genuine travellers will not be adversely affected.
This offline process has now moved to an online fraud monitoring process, integrating the profiling with visa processing systems to enable the department to detect fraud in real time.
‘We hope our IT fraud tracking innovation will be able to expand into many other areas of visa application monitoring over the coming years,’ Klaus added.