Federal investigators have made yet another discovery of a sophisticated fraud scheme involving a work authorization program for foreigners. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Tuesday that the Operational Practical Training program, known as OPT, has “become a magnet for fraud” with foreign students claiming employment from “highly suspect employers,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said. He described the controversy at a press conference, noting the program allows foreign students to work in their area of study for up to one year while attending school. Federal investigators say OPT fraud has exploded nationwide, reporting shocking discoveries upon visiting the alleged worksites claiming to employ the foreign students. They found empty buildings with locked doors where hundreds of foreign students were said to be working. In some cases, multiple employers claimed the same address, but none of them actually had a lease there. Some small homes were also listed as worksites for hundreds of foreign students, but had no employees present. When someone answered the door at one of the residences, they claimed to have no knowledge of the business. Other alleged employers claimed to have offshore HR and payroll personnel. Many of the employers had tax liens, civil lawsuit collections, and breaches of contract on their records. In some instances, foreign students who obtained work permits through the OPT program never showed up to work at the jobs they claimed to hold. Lyons said the employment program has “ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States,” adding that the latest fraud findings may be “only the tip of the iceberg.” Last week, agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a branch of ICE, visited 18 worksites in north Texas and made an “alarming” discovery of “coordinated employer clusters, where numerous employers in the same building complex are running nearly identical websites, sharing job postings and management personnel, but claiming no business relationships with each other,” John Condon, the agency’s Acting Executive Associate Director, said during Tuesday’s presser. In Houston, agents found an alleged “pay to stay visa fraud” scheme in which a company was “charging students under the table to help them fraudulently maintain visa status,” he added. Other cases also raised red flags. In New York, a supposed employer became visibly upset with federal investigators and denied having any knowledge of a company linked to his address “despite Homeland Security records and student reports confirming otherwise,” Condon said. A foreign student told investigators that the individual owned the worksite “but could not explain his denial.” Condon discussed an OPT employer in New Jersey claiming to support more than 150 foreign students who couldn’t answer federal investigators’ “basic questions about who they were or what they were hired to do.” The investigators encountered only one student at the site, “who had revealed that he had not worked for the listed copy in over a year” and “was instead being trained by a company based in India.” Lyons called the fraudulent activity “deliberate, coordinated, and criminal,” vowing that “more actions are forthcoming.” “DHS will relentlessly investigate, disrupt, and refer for prosecution anyone who exploits our programs. We have intensified our vetting at consular posts overseas, targeting trafficking, forced labor, document fraud, and unauthorized employment among student visa applicants,” Lyons said. “This fraud is not victimless. It is a blatant attack on the goodwill of the American people who generously allow foreign nationals access to our education system,” he added.