To all those aspirants dreaming about US Visas, Green cards and permanent citizenship, here’s a news piece to share which might help make or break your dreams to become a true US citizen.
US Citizenship and Immigration Service Officers (USCIS) have again started to snoop on to the social accounts of foreigners via fake social media accounts.
The practice which was active since 2017 was banned by the Homeland Security Department (DHS) from early this year. But due to some remarkable circumstances developed in the past few weeks, the USCIS has reversed a prior ban on officers creating fake profiles to conduct espionage on the aspiring citizens.
Strictly speaking, all seems to the fair in the name of National Security as Trump Administration doesn’t want to take chances while granting permissions to foreigners to become permanent citizens.
To avoid fraud and to mitigate security concerns, USCIS is allowing its officers to create fictitious social media accounts of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor those who applied for green cards, visas and citizenship status quo.
The objective is simply to keep a tab on the social media activities of the applicants through their social media profiles for which they have to submit their active social media account usernames from past June’19.
Screening of potential aspirants will be carried out after 45 days of their account submissions after which all their activities pro and against their Donald Trump government will be scrutinized.
How tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are allowing the DHS to create profiles remains a mystery. As one of the policies states that Impersonation is strictly prohibited on their platforms.
Nevertheless, more than 18k fake profiles are reported to be created for this purpose to make it easier for investigators to search for proof for fraud.
So, the next time you get an invite on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter; please think twice before befriending them.
Who knows, you might have already been victimized……?
NOTE- Such policies only affect the wrongdoers. Others might not feel the pain of fake profiles monitoring them at all.
