£18,500 gone: the IT engineer who thought he had a job at a London fintech

Ravi had been a software engineer in Hyderabad for seven years. He had worked on banking infrastructure, led a team of twelve, and had two international certifications. When a LinkedIn recruiter approached him about a senior backend role at a London-based fintech, he was cautious but interested.

The company had a professional website, a Companies House registration, a genuine-looking LinkedIn page, and a UK phone number that was always answered. The recruiter spoke fluent English and knew the technical stack — Java, Kubernetes, AWS — in enough detail to seem credible. The role paid £72,000. The Certificate of Sponsorship arrived within three weeks.

Everything checked out. Except one thing.

Ravi ran every check he knew how to run. He searched the company on Companies House: registered in 2021, active, no outstanding filing issues. He found the registered address on Google Maps — a real building in Shoreditch. He looked up the directors on LinkedIn. He checked the SOC code. He checked the salary.

The one check he did not run: the UKVI Register of Licensed Sponsors. The company had applied for a sponsor licence but had been refused in 2023 following concerns about its trading activity. It had never been listed. Without that listing, the Certificate of Sponsorship it had sent him was legally meaningless — and the document itself was a fabrication.

The fees came in stages.

First it was £4,000 — an "Immigration Skills Charge" that his employer said UKVI required to be paid by the applicant for tech sector hires. Ravi had read about the Immigration Skills Charge. It is real. What he did not know is that it is paid by the employer, not the worker. He paid.

Then £6,500 for a "priority processing" submission. Then £8,000 for a "digital certificate release fee." By the time the visa application submission portal rejected his CoS reference as invalid — meaning it did not exist in the UKVI system at all — Ravi had transferred £18,500.

The LinkedIn profile was deleted the same afternoon. The website went offline. The phone number was disconnected.

What would have stopped this.

The UKVI sponsor register check takes thirty seconds. This company was never on it. SponsorShield flags this at the first stage — before any payment, before any form, before any decision.

The Immigration Skills Charge fraud is particularly common because the charge is real — it exists, it is referenced in official guidance, and it sounds legitimate. The fraudster relies on the victim knowing enough about the process to recognise the terminology, but not quite enough to know who pays it.

The answer: the employer always pays the Immigration Skills Charge. The worker never pays it. If you are asked to pay it, you are being defrauded.