BEWARE: American E-VISA Scam to Defraud Nigerians

In one of the WhatsApp Groups I belong, someone dropped the image below. The moment I saw American Immigration, I was interested in reading the content of the message.

The said message contains what appears to be a communication from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The subject is an announcement that the United States President, Joe Biden, through an Executive Order is granting E-VISA to 25,000 Nigerians who are professionals in some strategic fields of endeavour.

The announcement directed interested Nigerians within the age bracket of 25–55 to send an email with their CV to a certain email address and when successful, they will be required to pay $250 English Proficiency Fee and $150 COVID19 Vaccine fee.

The email address: info@americaimmigration.us

To start with, for any American Government agency, the “Top-Level Domain” of their website MUST come from .gov.us, in Nigeria, it should come from .gov.ng.

So, as soon as I saw the email address and noticed it comes from a different top-level domain (.us), I knew that is a scam.

To confirm my curiosity,

1. I visited the domain (americaimmigration.us) on a web browser, it returns a cgi-bin folder, an empty folder in the home directory of the domain.

2. I used reverse domain tool to check who owns the americaimmigration.us and who the registrant is, it turns out that the registrant mask the contact detail.

3. I checked a directory of blacklisted emails, I found info@americaimmigration.us

My Conclusion:

The document is a carefully crafted phishing campaign by fraudsters to defraud innocent Nigerians.

Imagine if 1 million Nigerians pay a total of $400 each to these idiots. That would amount to $400,000,000, which is about 15.2 Billion Naira.

Nigerians are therefore advised to be guided and avoid the scam.

Destiny Young
Cybersecurity Professional
Writes from Port Harcourt

#cybersecurity
#AmericanVisa
#Nigeria
#VISA
#fraudsters
#scam
#EmailScam
#phishing
#evisa