Indian American businesswoman Sridevi Aiyaswamy pleads guilty to H1-B visa fraud

- ADVERTISEMENT -

NEW YORK – Indian American Sridevi Aiyaswamy, 50, owner of a Silicon Valley tech consulting business, plead guilty for three counts of visa fraud as she lied about giving out H1-B visas to skilled workers overseas, telling immigration officials that they had job offers from Cisco Systems Inc. when they did not.

According to the Mercury News, Aiyaswamy admitted to prosecutors that she had submitted more than 25 fraudulent documents between April 2010 and June 2013 for the purpose of obtaining H1-B non-immigrant classifications for skilled foreign workers.

The Register reported that Aiyaswamy had told U.S. Immigration officials that the workers were in line for positions such as “network engineer,” “systems analyst” and “programmer analyst,” and the forms she submitted on their behalf included forged signatures from supposed managers at Cisco.

However, they actually worked for Aiyaswamy at Strataserv, her IT consulting and contracting outfit in San Jose, California.

The pretrial statement has mentioned that Aiyaswamy’s actions gave her firm an advantage over their competitors as “they had to follow the normal, and often lengthy, visa application process,” whereas through the criminal conduct, she could immediately place clients when jobs became available at new technology companies.

Aiyaswamy is currently free on bond, but she is due back in court on November 15 for a crime that has a $250,000 fine and could have her in jail for 10 years.