Owner Of San Jose-Based Technology Staffing Firm Pleads Guilty to Visa Fraud
- Kishore Dattapuram also admitted to submitting fraudulent visa applications with staffing firm partner and owner of legal outsourcing firm.
An Indian American entrepreneur from California has pleaded guilty in federal court this week to visa fraud and conspiracy to commit visa fraud. Kishore Dattapuram, 55, of Santa Clara, and two other defendants, Kumar Aswapathi, 55, of Austin, Tex., and Santosh Giri, 48, of San Jose, were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud and 10 counts of substantive visa fraud, according to a Department of Justice press release. Aswapathi pleaded guilty to all counts on Oct. 19, 2020, while Giri pleaded guilty to all counts on Oct. 28.
Dattapuram and Aswapathi owned and operated Nanosemantics, Inc., a staffing firm headquartered in San Jose that provided skilled employees to technology companies in the Bay Area. Under its agreements with the companies and the employees it placed, Nanosemantics received a commission for workers placed at client companies. Giri, who worked closely with Nanosemantics, also owned a separate business — LexGiri, a legal process outsourcing firm that served as a “remote-virtual corporate immigration specialist” for companies.
According to the DoJ, “Dattapuram admitted to working with Aswapathi and Giri to submit fraudulent H-1B applications that falsely represented that foreign workers had specific jobs waiting for them at designated end-client companies when in fact the jobs did not exist.” On multiple occasions, Dattapuram paid companies to be listed as end-clients for the foreign workers, even though he knew the workers would never work for those employers. “The goal of the scheme was to allow Nanosemantics to obtain visas for job candidates before securing jobs for them,” the defendants told the court. This allowed Nanosemantics “to place those workers with employers as soon as those jobs were available, rather than waiting for the visa application process to conclude, and giving Nanosemantics an unfair advantage over its competitors,” they said.
Dattapuram’s and Giri’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for Feb. 24, 2025, before separate judges. Aswapathi has a status regarding sentencing on Nov. 25. Each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for each visa fraud count, and a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 on the conspiracy count.