Fraud by applicants includes:
- Multiple applications to increase the chances of winning
- Fraudulent claims to high school education
- Pop-up spouses. These are wives or husbands who appear on the case between the time of initial registration and the time of visa interview, usually because the successful lottery winner has sold the privilege of applying for a visa as spouse to the highest bidder. Sometimes the applicant is a victim of pressure from third party agents, who will use coercion to force the applicant to claim a fraudulent marriage so that the agent may sell the benefit of applying as spouse on the visa application.
- Add-on children. Like spouses, added on after registration, either by claiming new births, children of a former marriage now in custody of the
applicant or other excuse. As with spouses, sometimes applicants are forced to accept these add-on children against their will.
- False claims to employment or financial support in the US. Of course any immigrant may falsify their financial support documents, but this problem is particularly acute in the case of Diversity Visa applicants as they are not required to have relatives or established employers in the United States.
Fraud and abuse by third parties is just as prevalent.
- Consular officers have seen cases of collusion with post office officials so that notifications to winners of the lottery or either stolen and used by someone else or held hostage until the applicant pays for the release of the documentation.
- Just as commonly, unfortunately, the applicant may be extorted throughout the process. In other words, not just forced to pay for the release of their initial documents, but forced to pay criminal gangs in order to be allowed to complete their application. Again, this problem occurs to a limited extent with other visa categories as well, but because Diversity Visa applicants do not require relatives in the US and may be of relatively low education and employment status, they are particularly vulnerable.
- Nor is this sort of abuse limited to applicants who chose to enter the Diversity Visa program. Consular officers have also seen unscrupulous agents enroll groups of people without their knowledge. In Bangladesh, for example, one agent is reported to have enrolled an entire phone book so that he could then either extort money from winning applicants who had never entered the program to begin with or sell their winning slots to others.
