Two Dublin, California men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit H-1B visa fraud after prosecutors said they used fake University of California job claims to win visa approvals for foreign workers they later marketed to other clients.
Sampath Rajidi and Sreedhar Mada, both 51, admitted their roles in a scheme that ran from June 2020 to January 2023, according to documents released Friday by the US Justice Department. Rajidi operated S-Team Software Inc. and Uptrend Technologies LLC, and he petitioned for H-1B Specialty Occupation worker visas to place foreign nationals with different companies on a temporary basis. Mada, who served as chief information officer of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, used his position to support the false claim that the workers would be staffed on university projects.
The University of California had no such hiring requirement. Mada had supervisory authority in his department, but no power to hire H-1B workers without consulting senior leaders. Prosecutors said the two men falsely told immigration authorities that the beneficiaries would work in positions with the university, when those jobs did not exist. Once the visas were approved, the workers did not go to UC projects; Rajidi and Mada instead marketed them to other clients.
The case matters because H-1B visas are awarded through a lottery system, and the false institutional claims gave the pair approvals the candidates would otherwise not have received. The Justice Department said their scheme gave them an unfair edge over competing firms and depleted the pool of visas available to others. The matter is being prosecuted by Assistant US Attorney Douglas Harman and is under investigation by several federal agencies, including the US Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service, Homeland Security Investigations, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate.
Rajidi and Mada face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine each.
