As the backlog has grown for many employment-based U.S. visas, applications have skyrocketed for the so-called “Einstein visa” reserved for people who can show extraordinary ability in their fields.
But as interest has spiked in the high-achiever visa, called the EB-1A, so has a market for credential-boosting services that in some cases may constitute fraud, a CBS News investigation found.
Some visa hopefuls, especially in science and technology fields, have turned to a marketplace of services to pad their resumes with false or low-quality records of achievement. Research brokers or consultants ghostwrite research papers, boost article citations, or confer vanity awards to customers willing to pay up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes the applications, is aware that a growing number of EB-1A applicants have been applying with purchased or fraudulent credentials, two former USCIS officials familiar with the agency’s fraud investigations told CBS News.
“If you have money, then you have a way to buy your evidence and fabricate those things,” said the official, who left the agency last year and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations at USCIS.
Those who are caught misrepresenting themselves or using fraudulent credentials on a visa application may simply have their application denied, but could also be prevented from successfully reapplying for a visa by being deemed inadmissible to the U.S. USCIS could also revoke an existing visa from someone if they find they lied on their application.
“USCIS is committed to rooting out fraud by thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens seeking immigration benefits,” agency spokesman Matthew Tragesser wrote in a statement to CBS News. “Anyone submitting fake evidence or misrepresenting themselves will be found out and face the consequences.”
But those who sell the credentials, middlemen who often operate anonymously on social media or through companies marketed as consulting groups, profit regardless.
Academic research brokers
The number of EB-1A petitions has tripled over the past four years, according to quarterly data from USCIS. Nearly 7,500 applied from April to June 2025, the most recent available data shows, up from about 2,500 in the last three months of 2021.
Meanwhile, the approval rate for EB-1A petitions has been dropping since 2021, with about 67% approved from April to June 2025. Data from immigration analytics platform Lawfully indicates it dropped to closer to 50% in recent months.
Applicants must demonstrate they meet at least three of 10 criteria to be considered for an EB-1A visa, such as winning awards, authoring scholarly articles, or being a member of a professional association.
CBS News identified dozens of posts and advertisements on Telegram, Facebook and in WhatsApp groups marketing scholarly papers that customers can pay to have their names on. Several posts specifically targeted visa applicants.
WhatsApp and Facebook owner Meta confirmed some of the posts violated their policies around fake documents, frauds and scams, in which they ban content that “enables users to get visa approvals without fulfilling normal requirements.” Meta removed the ads that CBS News sent to a company spokesperson as examples.
Three individuals who posted advertisements told CBS News that clients didn’t need to contribute to the papers to be listed as authors.
One individual running a visa “profile enhancement” Facebook page told software engineer Abhishek Bakare in May that for $500, he could list him as the fourth author on a computer science research paper, according to a recording of a phone call between the two that Bakare shared with CBS News.
Bakare, who developed an artificial intelligence tool to spot low-quality research, had feigned interest in making a purchase to gather information on the fraud, he told CBS News.
“Already I was working on this [paper] from the past four to five months,” the seller told Bakare on the phone. “I’m adding you literally at the very last stage.”
He later added that at the time, he had 55 clients, all of them Indian nationals and most aiming for EB-1A or similar employment-based visas.
“There are people, those who have paid, they have basically purchased a paper,” the seller admitted, “which is not sort of ethical for EB-1.”
A paper with the same title as the one he offered Bakare was accepted by an international conference co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a widely-respected organization within the electrical engineering industry.
When CBS News contacted the seller, he denied that he offered to sell the authorship position to Bakare, and instead claimed the $500 was for a conference fee. If Bakare had moved forward with working with him, he said, he would have had to create the conference presentation to get his name on the paper.
“My process is the same for everyone: without actively working on a paper, it isn’t practically possible for me to add anyone,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “I have not done this in the past, I am not doing it now, and I will not do so in the future.”
Some papers are published not just to confer authorship to a paying customer, but simply to cite an existing paper to make it appear more credible. One of the research brokers CBS News spoke with, based in Nigeria, charges $500 for a citation.
“I will boost citations by writing 100% human written articles and publishing them to a journal but I will include your article references in the reference section,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message to CBS News.
He told CBS News he has a team of 10 people who work on the writing and publication process. All of his clients are trying to get U.S. visas, he said.
Low-quality scientific research produced for resume padding isn’t an activity exclusive to visa applicants, according to researchers at Northwestern University and The University of Sydney. They found in a recent study that low-quality or plagiarized papers are increasingly published not only in predatory, pay-to-publish platforms, but reputable journals as well.
They discovered that a small group of bad actors were hired as editors at reputable journals, allowing them to “accept for publication pretty much anything,” said Luis Amarol, one of the study’s authors.
“It’s almost like a spy movie, right? You send a spy to infiltrate a place and that spy inside is actually betraying the organization,” he said.
In some cases, individuals will submit a paper to a journal, and once they secure acceptance, request to add authors during the editing process, said Reese Richardson, another author on the study. This allows research brokers to sell authorship slots in papers that are all but guaranteed to be published.
“Profile building” services
The EB-1A criteria extend beyond papers and citations. That has led to the rise of “profile building” services that promise to help customers enhance their resumes, CBS News found.
Arizona-based Next League Program‘s website says that clients will become eligible candidates for EB-1A visas in “a matter of a few months,” and previously promised that participants will become authors of at least one book, over 100 articles and become a founder of an institution with a patent to their name. Its owner, Ranjeet Mudholkar, says that 56 individuals who completed the Next League Program received EB-1A visas.
Two former participants shared receipts showing they paid about $10,000 to enroll. Company lawyers said in court documents that it earned $1 million in revenue in 2024.
“In my mind it was like, I will get a helping hand to accomplish those things with little time from my end,” said one former participant, referring to the website’s promises. He added that he believed the program’s director had connections with journals and award companies that would help him achieve the credentials.
He and another participant who spoke with CBS News requested their names be withheld because they signed a non-disparagement agreement.
In return for their payments, they received dozens of hours of pre-recorded videos with advice on how to hone their areas of expertise and prepare their applications. Neither said they thought the guidance was adequate to build the resume the program’s website advertised, and neither received the one-on-one coaching they said they were promised, which required making their way through the prerecorded content first.
They soon came to believe that some Next League participants were buying their credentials, they told CBS News.
At least seven successful EB-1A applicants who completed the program received the same vanity award, called the Globee Business Award, a review by CBS News found. Immigration attorneys told CBS News that although the award’s website claims it has a “rigorous and comprehensive judging process,” it is easily obtained by those who pay a fee.
At least two of those individuals had published scholarly articles in an India-based journal whose website promises to publish peer-reviewed papers within four hours of submission after publication fees were received. One of them told CBS News their review took a few days, and that she chose it because it had lower submission fees.
Richardson, the academic fraud researcher, reviewed the journal and described it as “predatory,” identifying several alleged red flags to CBS News. A genuine peer review process takes months, often longer than a year, and there is no guarantee after an article is submitted to a legitimate journal that it will be sent out for peer review or that it will be published, he said.
The journal’s editors told CBS News they do not guarantee publication and accept roughly half of all submissions.
When asked about purchased credentials, Mudholkar wrote in a statement to CBS News that the company “does not sell, require, or mandate any specific awards, journals, or publications, nor does it submit evidence without legal review and advisement,” and that “participants retain agency over where they publish.”
A few of the Next League Program participants also set up a professional organization, the American Association of Information Technology Professionals. Mudholkar agreed to be the chairman, so they would have a U.S. citizen on paper as its leader, he told CBS News. Being a member of a professional organization or society meets one of the EB-1A criteria.
In an interview with CBS News, Mudholkar disputed the idea that Next League Program’s sole purpose is to help visa hopefuls meet these criteria.
“You really need to be an expert in your field,” he said. “We are looking for people who have changed lives.”
He described the program as a “transformation coaching program” that follows a process he patented, and said that he encourages applicants to view the visa as a “milestone” in becoming the best version of themselves.
Mudholkar also repeatedly emphasized that the company’s status as an alternative business structure in Arizona lends it a layer of regulatory overview other companies don’t have. The structure allows non-lawyers to run a company that provides legal services, and requires getting a license from the state Supreme Court.
In interviews, two former participants Mudholkar referred to CBS News praised the program and credited it with helping them get an EB-1A visa. But multiple others wrote on social media or in complaints to the Arizona attorney general’s office that they felt they were scammed.
“As with any selective, high-intensity program, experiences vary. Public praise and criticism both exist,” Mudholkar wrote to CBS News.
Profile building services can blur the line of what’s considered fraudulent.
“Having an attorney or career coach help you apply to legitimate opportunities that can raise an applicants’ profile is not wrong,” Locke said. “That line between what’s appropriate like profile building, what’s fair-game versus what’s shady, it can be difficult to spot.”
A yearslong backlog meets a USCIS crackdown
Federal law sets annual limits for each visa category. In FY 2025, the cap was 140,000 employment-based visas, including EB-1A, with no more than 7% going to nationals of one single country, regardless of its population.
That can create huge backlogs, particularly for applicants from India and China, where demand for U.S. employment-based visas is high. Many of the services and advertisements CBS News reviewed appeared to target Indian nationals, who have to wait years to receive certain visas.
The EB-1 visa, of which EB-1A is a subcategory, is less backlogged than the EB-2 visa, which is reserved for those with “exceptional ability,” but does not require the same level of acclaim as the EB-1A.
That’s helped make EB-1A — and the marketplace of services around it — more popular.
“They’ve been put in a situation just that’s super untenable, which increases desperation, which increases risk taking.” Locke said.
The vast majority of EB-1A applicants are not fraudulent, said Melissa Warburton, an immigration attorney who left USCIS last year. Investigations into EB-1A fraud, which Warburton said predate the current administration, are coinciding with a broader crackdown on fraud in visa applications.
“We are going to be here with our agents investigating large scale fraud patterns,” said USCIS director Joseph Edlow in an October interview with CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez.
In its recent hiring push for immigration service officers, USCIS created the new title of “homeland defenders.” Its informational webpage includes a video of Edlow saying the agency is “declaring war on fraud.”
USCIS announced in early December it was launching a new vetting center focused on “more thorough supplemental review of immigration applications and petitions.”
It is not clear how much of this effort will be directed toward EB-1A petitions, which make up less than 1% of the total applications USCIS processes each year.
“USCIS is strengthening the integrity of all immigrant worker programs with increased screening and vetting in support of President Trump’s promise to protect American jobs and workers,” Tragesser, the agency spokesperson, wrote to CBS News. “Anti-fraud measures apply to EB-1A as they do to all immigration benefit categories.”
This month, the agency will propose a new regulation that will, among other changes, “update provisions governing extraordinary ability,” “modernize outdated provisions” and “clarify evidentiary requirements” for the visa.
USCIS may now be going back and reevaluating some EB-1A applications it already approved to check for fraud, immigration attorneys and the former USCIS employees said. The agency can revoke a visa, and even initiate a denaturalization process, if it can prove willful misrepresentation or fraud.
“We don’t know to what extent people have done this,” said immigration attorney Evan Law, “but if they did commit fraud, it will come back to them eventually, in my view.”
