Engineer creates fake US visa, gets caught at Mumbai airport

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Fed up of the pressure by his parents to study in the US, a mechanical engineer created a fake visa and was arrested for trying to travel abroad on it. The Crime Branch's Unit VIII arrested 23-year-old Malay Raojibhai Daware who hails from Surat, at the international airport in Mumbai on Tuesday.

Daware told police that his parents had been telling him to go to the US for further studies after he got a degree in mechanical engineering. He allegedly attempted GRE and TOEFL but did not clear them. The GRE, the Graduate Record Examinations, is a standardised test that is an admissions requirement for most graduate schools in the US. The TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language, is a standardised test to measure the English language ability of non-native speakers wishing to enroll in English-speaking universities.

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On failing both exams, Daware decided to fool his parents and prepared a fake visa stamp using the photoshop software. He then told his family that he had qualified for further studies in the USA and would secure admission at the University of Texas.

Daware stuck the fake visa on his passport and four days ago came to Mumbai to board a flight to the US. Immigration officials immediately spotted that the visa was fake and informed the local police. The police initially thought Daware was cheated by bogus agents, but when they questioned him, he revealed that he had created the fake visa stamp because of family pressure.

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The police arrested him and seized his passport and laptop. They found a soft copy of the fake visa in his laptop. "We have registered the FIR against him under sections 465 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document) and 420 (cheating) of Indian Penal Code. He was produced before a court which remanded him in police custody," said Akbar Pathan, DCP detection.

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