Front Burner - Dumpster diving, forged signatures, and alleged immigration fraud

Episode Date: July 4, 2019

CBC News has learned about an alleged massive immigration scheme involving illicit job offers, hundreds of Chinese nationals, and dozens of business people in Saskatchewan. The story follows an investigation by the Canada Border Services Agency and court documents relating to a criminal trial for a married couple from the province. CBC investigative reporter Geoff Leo unravels the story.

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Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. I'm here today with my colleague, investigative reporter Jeff Leo. Jeff, are you there? I am here. It is so great to have you on the podcast. Yeah, nice to be here. So what we're going to do today is unravel a really interesting investigation you now have a lot more details about, hey? It's true. Details that come from dumpster diving, from accidentally

recorded conversations, and also alleged fraud through hotmail accounts. Hotmail accounts. So these were all elements of an alleged massive immigration fraud, a case based out of Saskatchewan. It involved illicit job offers, hundreds of Chinese nationals, and dozens of business people in the province. This is one that you're going to want to stick around for. This is FrontBurner. Okay, so let's dive into this. Okay, so let's dive into this. April 2012, a guy named Chi Wang walks into a provincial immigration office in Regina. And I understand officials become suspicious. Why?

Yeah, well, they recognized him, for starters. And they saw him. He was carrying some documents, a stack of documents. And so one of the senior immigration officials from Saskatchewan saw him walking in with these documents, suspected that they were immigration applications. And this set off alarm bells for him. And why did it set off alarm bells? You mentioned before that they recognized him? Yeah. So Chi Wang had already at that point been suspended from using the Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program, which is the immigration program here in the province. had also been offering jobs with companies, like legitimate companies, where he didn't get the appropriate consent of the people who actually owned the company. So he was suspended for a couple of years.

Then he walks in with these documents. This sends up some alarm bells for officials. And the idea here being he's offering jobs to people so that they can get to Saskatchewan easier, right? Yeah. So this is part of the program where people can come to Canada who are seeking permanent residency. And one of the ways you can do that is by getting a legitimate job offer, you know, eventually applying for permanent residency here. Okay, so essentially this immigration official recognizes Chi because he's been suspended before for essentially defrauding the system. What happens after he sees him in this immigration office with a stack of papers? Yeah, so somebody was assigned to review current immigration applications. Don't know exactly what the process was, but what they found was 20 applications that

were deemed suspicious, and they linked at least six of them to Chi, and they did that through email addresses that they knew he had been using, this sort of thing. So it appeared to them, you know, he's still doing this. Okay, so then tell me more about how this investigation unravels. The Saskatchewan program sent this material over to the Canada Border Services Agency, which is the agency responsible for policing the immigration rules. And so investigators took a look at the material. And some of it was, you know, fairly rudimentary, right? Like they were looking at these job applications, and they were for what appeared to be legitimate companies who had corporate websites, corporate email addresses. And what struck them as odd was that, you know, they were using Hotmail accounts.

We're back to the Hotmail accounts. Live.ca accounts or just, you know, accounts. It was like, why would a professional organization be using accounts like that? So that and other inconsistencies they spotted in the documents, you know, set their curiosity meter too high. Okay. And is this when they start dumpster diving? Exactly. So we don't know exactly how this worked, but this was at the home of Chi and his wife, Yuzhuan Q.

They live out in White City, which is just near Regina. And they've got those big bins, you know, you roll out to the street. And immigration officials went by at some point when the bins were out. They took all the stuff inside and sifted through it all. And what did they find? Well, so they found a bunch of documents that, you know, further got their curiosity and concerns up. They found job offer letters, so letters that appeared to be offering jobs to various businesses, for example, like a hotel, a motel in Fort Capelle, a small community here

in Saskatchewan. And the letter got their attention because at the top of the letter, it looked like somebody had actually pasted on, like taped on a header on the top of a letter and then taped on the signature on the bottom of the letter. So it just looked like a doctored letter. Okay. You know, and not that elegantly doctored. They also found a sheet of paper where it appeared somebody had been practicing the signature of a business owner in order to create one of these documents. So that sort of thing, you know, suggested to them that there was some things worthy of more digging.

And we should be clear here that all of this information that you have, it comes from these court documents that you were recently able to obtain, right? So it's called an information to obtain. It's a big, thick document that was filed by CBSA officials. What they wanted to do was get access to Chi and Yuzhuan Hu's bank accounts in order to further verify the things that they thought were going on. So in order to do that, they need to get a search warrant. In order to do that, they need to file an information to obtain. And this is basically an argument to the court to say, here's why you should let us get access to their bank account. So they laid out their whole case that they had at that point back in 2014. Okay. Okay. And we should also mention that this case is now before the courts and lawyers for

Chi and his wife say that they're not guilty. They're pleading not guilty. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. He says when the full story is known, my clients will be seen to be not guilty. And so, you know, all of the things we're talking about here are allegations. They have not been tested in court. We've talked about what they found when they went dumpster diving. I'm also interested in this accidentally recorded phone call.

Yeah. Tell me about that. So this was a company called Impact Printers and a fellow who runs the company, Dave Moskaluk. And he, according to the ITO, the information to obtain document, he had his company had offered, apparently, for jobs to Chinese nationals. And there's, you know, indication that he and Chi were working together on these applications. And at one point, Chi needed him to get the password for their online account for one of these applications. And so Dave makes a phone call to his immigration official in Saskatchewan and delivers that message. I need this password. Please get back to me. Thanks very much.

And he hangs up the phone, or at least he thinks he hangs up the phone. So he hangs up the phone. It doesn't really hang up. So it keeps recording while he then turns to someone who's there with him who appears to have a Chinese accent. And officials, CBSA officials, say in this document they believe it's Chi. So he's sitting there talking to him. And then the conversation happens back and forth where Davis basically wanted to know so tell me again, what are we doing here? How does this work? And so they talk through how it works.

And at one point, you know, Dave expresses some concern, like, isn't this being kind of sneaky? Essentially wondering, are we doing things that we shouldn't be doing? I talked to Dave Moskaluk about all of this, and he remembers talking to Chi way back in 2012. And he remembers that Chi wanted him to offer jobs to Chinese people. And he told me it didn't seem to matter to him whether there was an actual job offer available. He just wanted the job offer letter. So he told me, quote, he wanted us to sign and agree we'll find a job. And if we

don't have one, he'll find one for them. So the immigration officials say, and in the ITO, it says, you know, after listening to this call, it was clear, quote, that Moscow does not plan on actually employing the foreign nationals that he plans to offer jobs to. Is the allegation here that taking the hotmail accounts and the documents with the dodgy headers and this one anecdote that you've just told me with Dave, is the allegation here that this is how the scheme worked many times over, that Qi and his wife were essentially offering jobs to Chinese nationals, but those jobs did not exist. Yeah. And I think the idea is that, you know, many of the jobs, you know, did not exist. I think

that's what they would allege. I don't know that they're saying, you know, none of the jobs did not exist. I think that's what they would allege. I don't know that they're saying none of the jobs exist. And certainly we found examples of people who say, yes, we used his services and we hired a couple of people and they worked out well. So it's certainly not the case that there were no Chinese people taking up any jobs. That's not the case. But, yes, the scope of this thing is huge. In the Crown's fact statement filed in court, they say they found a record of more than 1,200 names of Chinese nationals in the records of the couple's home. They found about 450 job offers connected to specific Chinese nationals and connected to specific Saskatchewan businesses, about 100 businesses in total.

The scope of this is really quite broad. And the fact that there are 20 people that have been called, that's just a portion of the people that the CBSA alleges had some connection to all of this. You mentioned that these 20 business owners are witnesses in this case. Have any of them gotten in any trouble here? There's no indication that any of them have gotten into any trouble. There's no indication that anyone's pursuing them for having broken any rules or anything like that. They're being called to witness in the trial of Chi Wang and his wife. And that's their role. And I understand that some business owners say they had no clue this was happening at all.

Yeah, that is what Loretta Thrynan told me. She owns KO Advertising, which is a small advertising agency in Estevan, Saskatchewan. And I called her up about this whole case. She knew about Chi Wang. She remembered him asking her if she would like to offer jobs to Chinese nationals. She said she told him no. She felt the whole thing was a little sketchy. Well, I kind of sort of got a funny vibe from him, and that's why I didn't really want to get involved. Well, how did you get my name? And so she was very surprised when I told her that, according to CBSA documents, her company had offered eight jobs to Chinese nationals, and I had letters in front of me that were signed by her. Nope, didn't write that letter. Holy crap. Wow. You know, it's interesting to me. It seems like quite a bit of what this couple allegedly did. It actually wasn't that complicated, hey? Well, I mean, some of it certainly appears to have not been that complicated. I mean, even to the idea of allegedly cutting and pasting out, you know, headers and signatures and pasting them on sheets of paper and, you know, incorporating companies that didn't exist and offering jobs for those, according to CBSA. So part of the problem is we don't know the whole picture. The job offer part of this

is just a small part of a big plan you would have to have in order to connect with people in China, bring them here, get them all the way through the immigration system. So there's complexities there that we certainly wouldn't be able to tell just from looking from the outside. And on top of that, we're talking about, you know, hundreds of names of people, allegedly. There's a lot of complexity there, I would say. And, you know, speaking of that, we're talking about possibly 100 businesses, you mentioned 1200 names of Chinese nationals and investigators found. Is there a sense of how successful this couple allegedly was? Did they get a lot of people here? What we know is, so the numbers are 1,200 names they found. 641 of those names show up in federal and provincial immigration systems somewhere.

So they're noted somewhere in the systems. And then of those, at the time the charges were filed, which was December of 15, 78 of those people had actually become permanent residents in Canada. I mean, I don't know, you know, you say how successful, I don't know that successful. They had 78 people who had become permanent residents that apparently had gone through them for immigration services. Do we know how prevalent this kind of scheme is? Is this happening a lot?

Well, I mean, reports certainly pop up from time to time. It's happened quite a bit where reports have popped up about this sort of thing in B.C. I did a story a couple of years ago where somebody was traveling around northern Saskatchewan offering to pay people envelopes of cash in exchange for job offers. We actually did an undercover investigation and recorded this person on tape making that offer. Usually our owner have a really high personal income. Their income tax is pretty high. So I just give them cash to save their tax or also save tax for our company. You don't like him or he doesn't make enough profit for you. I just find another job for him. We also talked to the business owner who confirmed with us that she was charging Chinese nationals $200,000

to get them a job in Canada. So the amount of money is massive. And I think the demand is significant. And so you can see when you have that sort of money-making potential, wherever there's that kind of profit available, that may very well attract entrepreneurs. I'm also struck by how long this case has been ongoing. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective here. So at the top of this conversation, we talked about how this investigation was sparked in 2012. And the charges against Chi and his wife were not laid until December 2015. Why do you think it took so long for investigators to lay charges here? Well, I mean, clearly this was a really complicated case, a sprawling case. We do know that, you know, CBSA is not, there aren't a ton of investigators.

I believe there are three for all of Saskatchewan. So I think that's part of it. I imagine for people who are trying to immigrate to Saskatchewan or, you know, to other provinces around the country through legitimate channels, as we've seen them laid out here, people could see this as queue jumping, right? Kind of getting a bit of a leg up on the system or getting people into the country who, you know, really don't deserve to be here. And, you know, we do also do stories about people who complain about Canada's immigration system taking so long. The last time Joey Cruz saw her daughters was three years ago before she left the Philippines for Canada to be a caregiver. To this day, she is still waiting for permanent residency. What do you want? Magic status.

Canada's a desirable place, right? Canada is a desirable place, right? And that's why it's a very easy product for people to sell, because it's a very desirable place to be. And, you know, that's the thing, I guess, that would also motivate, you know, people to take advantage of the system if they can. Jeff, thank you so much for taking us through this really complex, but also very interesting case. I learned a lot. Yeah, I'm happy to do it. Just an update before we go today on something we've talked quite a bit about on this show, the potential of foreign meddling in Canada's election.

The Toronto Star and BuzzFeed News have now gotten CSIS on the record, saying they've identified so-called threat actors who are attempting to influence our democratic institutions. Apparently, Canada's cyber defense agency, the Communications Security Establishment, has already briefed the senior political staff of one major federal party, we don't know which, and informed them that there have been covert attempts to influence the upcoming elections. The agencies are being very scant with details. We'll keep you posted on this developing story. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down.

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