Avoiding Spouse Scams

Australia, spouse visa - If you are married, engaged to (fiance), or in a de facto (common law) relationship with an Australian citizen, permanent resident may be eligible for a Partner Visa.

In Australia, spouse visa applications have increased in number is the last few months. However, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship has cautioned those people wishing to enter the country through this visa. As it is, the spouse visa has also been targeted by many unscrupulous individuals to dupe a lot of people.

There are a wide variety of scams relating the spouse visa out there, and getting into any of these is certainly not going to be a good experience. Thus, you need to be well prepared for these. Here are some reminders to make sure that you don't fall for these scams easily.

One of the first things that you need to take note of is that, to be able to apply for a spouse visa, you and your partner are required to have met physically within six months prior to placing your application. Here, one of the most common scams would often involve the alleged potential spouse asking for money in order to meet you within that six month period. Many overeager folks would often easily fall for this one.

However, you need to keep in mind that, if your supposed potential spouse is indeed for real, then he or she will be the one making the effort to meet you. Take note that such scams usually happen online, where the anonymity that a person has can make it quite hard in determining if they are for real or not. Thus, you need to rather careful when entering online relationships.

On the other hand, in order to convince the Australian embassy to grant you a spouse or partner visa, you need to provide enough evidence that your relationship is for real. Here, documentary evidences, such marriage certificates, would come in quite handy for such purposes. However, you need to be sure that you are providing genuine papers and not fake ones (a common method used by scammers to make things go faster), as the consequences of that can be quite a bad experience.

However, even those couples who are genuinely getting a spouse visa for their intended purpose are still prone to fall prey to con artists. Here, the immigration agent con is still one of the most common. Many couple wishing to get their visas much faster can easily be lured by this con men. The best way that you can do here is to make sure that your agents are duly recognized by the Migration Agents Registration Authority.