A Virginia couple has pled guilty to H-1B fraud charges in a scheme that made them millions, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.

A married couple — Raju Kosuri, 44, and Smriti Jharia, 45 — created a visa-for-sale system involving some 900 H-1B visa petitions over a multi-year period, according to the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Court records detail an elaborate operation that required a series of fictions to pull off.

Through a series of shell companies that purported to provide IT staffing and services to corporate clients, the defendants H-1B visa petitions on behalf of workers. These workers had to pay the visa fees, legal and administrative costs — as much as $4,000 — in violation of the visa program’s rules.

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