Twenty Years of Immigration Consultancy Abuse

25 August 2026

The Aliyah Boiler Rooms

Last week we published the first investigation in the series “Follow the Money”, where a single receipt from a victim of an immigration scam in Australia, exposed a global corporate network of scammers. Today’s follow up investigation digs deeper into the same “modus operandi” and identifies four groups all based in Israel operating since twenty years ago.

Our research shows a well established “business model” of companies operating under a veneer of legitimacy running immigration scams that have managed to avoid law-enforcement scrutiny for two decades. These businesses silence victims and their critical voices hiding their operations behind dozens of brands and offshore companies across the world and constantly running online reputation management campaigns that remove as many traces as possible of their wrong doing.

Why it matters? Immigration scams mostly target poor and vulnerable communities across the world, that are hoping to find better living condition in countries like Canada, US and Australia. The victims are scammed of their last pennies and often put themselves in debt by family members and friends to fulfill their dreams. For the scammer, they are just digits in a spreadsheet, adding up to a potential performance reward.

Who are they? It is hard to ignore a recurring feature of the immigration scam networks we have investigated: the core players across every cluster we have encountered are Israelis, often operating from Israel and through key companies registered there. Tel Aviv, in particular, repeatedly emerges as a hub for the call-center operations behind these businesses.

Qurium encountered the same pattern while investigating the “Sapphire Network“, where affiliate-marketing operations and financial-scam call centers were similarly connected to actors operating from Israel. The parallels are striking: affiliate networks generate leads, multilingual call centers convert them into paying customers, and a web of companies and service providers supports the operation..

The call centers in Israel often recruit young people who have recently made Aliyah — Jewish immigration to Israel — and are looking for their first job. Foreign-language skills can make Tel Aviv call-center jobs an accessible entry into the labour market, but positions advertised as sales, marketing, or customer support may involve scam call centers operations targeting customers abroad.

Israel is not the only recurring jurisdiction. Cyprus and Spain also appears frequently in our investigations as base for criminal operations. Both sunny countries are popular for easy company registration and regular destinations to clean and invest the money.

Why it is related to Qurium’s work? The actors that facilitate immigration scams build their business using the very same tools and expertise needed when running dis-information campaigns: bullet proof hosting, affiliate marketing or online reputation management (ORM). Qurium has documented the use and abuse of such tools in several investigations.

Those that feel unaccountable need to be exposed and their methods must be documented and revealed.

— How come that Meta keeps profiting from malicious ads?

— How come that the very same scams can run for decades without disruption?

— Why is it so difficult to stop abusive businesses?

“Denial is the most predictable of all human responses” (The Matrix Reloaded, 2003)

Forensic report: Following the Money II: Twenty Years of Immigration Consultancy Abuse

Further reading:

Qurium Media Foundation is an international non-profit organization that provides secure hosting, digital forensics, incident response, and infrastructure protection for journalists, human rights defenders, and public-interest media organizations worldwide. Its investigations focus on censorship, surveillance, digital attacks, and the infrastructures that enable them. Learn more at qurium.org.

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