Following up on its March 27, 2023 announcement that it had received enough initial registrations for the Fiscal Year 2024 (“FY24”) H-1B Cap, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) has released data about the number of registrations received for the visa lottery. USCIS received a record breaking 780,884 H-1B registrations during the three week registration period. Of these over 780 thousand registrations, USCIS determined 758,994 were eligible registrations. This figure excludes duplicate registrations, those with failed payments, and those that were deleted by prospective employers prior to the closing of the registration period. The number of registrations for FY24 mark a sixty-one percent increase from 474,421 eligible registrations received for FY23. This significant increase has raised “serious concerns” and USCIS has begun to investigate potential employers who may have worked together to submit multiple registrations on behalf of the same beneficiary to increase their chance of being selected in the H-1B lottery.

Michael Sestak, a former US Foreign Service Officer and one-time chief of the non-immigrant visa unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, has been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a money-for-visas scheme, which US prosecutors called “one of the largest bribery schemes involving a Foreign Service Officer in the history of the United States.” The ex-diplomat admitted to approving nearly 500 visas over a two-year period in exchange for $3 million in bribes, which he funneled through China and invested in real estate in Thailand.

Sestak, a former police officer and US Marshal, collaborated with Binh Tang Vo and his sister, Hong Vo, both US citizens living in Vietnam, and their cousin, Truc Tranh Huynh, a Vietnamese citizen, in the scheme that charged up to $70,000 per visa for applicants, even if they had been previously denied. Last month, the Justice Department announced that Binh Tang Vo was sentenced to eight years in prison plus forfeiture of nearly $5.1 million. Even with that forfeiture, millions in funds allegedly obtained through the visa bribery scheme remain unaccounted for.

Sestak is the most recent consular officer to be punished for selling visas, since the State Department started investigating and prosecuting for visa fraud in 1999. A Diplomatic Security spokesperson told Vice that as of 2013, twenty-four American employees at US Embassies and Consulates worldwide have been convicted of bribery, conflicts of interest, and visa and passport fraud, including husband-and-wife team Acey Johnson and Long Lee, who were convicted in 2003 of a visa-selling scheme at the US Embassy in Hanoi that continued in Sri Lanka, earning them $700,000.

Gale Smith of Diplomatic Security said their agents are now embedded in consular affairs departments and work with local authorities to monitor fraud and corruption. “Many US embassies now have a special program within the Regional Security Office to investigate both external and employee fraud,” she stated to Vice in an email. “This special group of investigators works alongside host-country law enforcement.”