Capital One’s Indian Mafia Exposed: Massive H-1B Kickback Scheme Displaces American Workers...

by Matt Forney at The Visa Files

Inflated rates, fake resumes, and millions of dollars in kickbacks while American tech workers get shown the door

For the past couple of months, I’ve been covering Indian-led hiring discrimination, visa fraud, and incompetence scandals at various American companies, including Capital One. I can now report that senior Indian managers at Capital One are accused of running a massive kickback racket that funnels millions through a hidden network of Indian-owned bodyshops firms in the Richmond, Virginia area. In short, American tech workers are pushed out of Capital One, replaced with underpaid H-1B, F-1, and H-4 visa holders with phony credentials while managers pocket the difference between inflated billing rates and the contractors’ low salaries. This is exactly the kind of issue that Project Firewall, the Department of Labor’s initiative to investigate companies engaging in wage theft, visa fraud, and discrimination against Americans, should look into. (A compilation of my previous reporting on Capital One can be found here.)

Capital One’s Indian Kickback Machine and How it Works

The scheme is incredibly simple and profitable: Capital One managers steer contracts to a tight circle of preferred bodyshops, the list of which includes GC Services, NextSource, Apex, Pyramid, Artech Information, Astyra, Diversant, Ascendion, Pride Technologies, ENGEN, and more. These firms then subcontract the actual staffing to another layer of obscure, Indian-run LLCs clustered in the Richmond-Glen Allen area, including Artifiction LLC, Intellect Technologies, Global Sumi Technologies Inc, Arka Technologies, Rising Tides Solutions LLC, and many more. These sub-vendors are allegedly run by relatives, college buddies, or close associates of the Capital One directors who are signing the deals. Capital One directors Ranjit Kasanaboina, Srini Vasamsetti, Ganesh Kandula, Satish Kesiboyana, and others are implicated in the scandal.

The theft works like so: a contractor billed to Capital One at a rate of, say, $120-160 per hour may only get paid $60-70 an hour. The remaining $50-90 is split, with part of it going to the primary bodyshop, part going to the sub-vendor, and part kicked back to Capital One managers in the form of cash or laundered payments.

This process has accelerated the displacement of American workers from Capital One. Countless teams have seen Americans with decades of experience inexplicably laid off or reassigned only to see their positions filled weeks later by H-1Bs who routinely exaggerate or outright lie about their previous employment and skills. Labor condition applications are allegedly doctored to show false job conditions, including false descriptions of roles and worksites, evading Department of Labor scrutiny while the real money is sent offshore or into personal accounts. A former Indian-American intern at Capital One sheds further light on this: