Spotting Fake Sponsorship Offers: Red Flags Every Applicant Should Know

Under the published Home Office sponsor rules, a UK employer never asks the applicant for money in exchange for a job, a Certificate of Sponsorship, or a sponsor licence slot. Every fee in the legal sponsorship process is paid either by the employer to the Home Office (the CoS assignment fee, the Immigration Skills Charge) or by the applicant to the Home Office (the visa application fee, the Immigration Health Surcharge). No money flows from the applicant to the employer or to an agent.

The five most common UK sponsorship scams in 2026

1. CoS-for-sale

A bogus company, sometimes genuinely on the register, sells fictitious Certificates of Sponsorship for £15,000–£30,000. The CoS may be technically valid at the point of issue. Within weeks the company’s licence is revoked for compliance breach, the CoS is cancelled, and the applicant loses both the payment and the visa.

2. Recruitment “registration fee”

An offshore agent advertises guaranteed UK jobs, then asks for a few hundred pounds to “register your file” or “process your application with the employer”. Once paid, contact slows or stops; no genuine job offer materialises.

3. Cloned employer site

A scammer registers a domain visually similar to a real licensed sponsor (tesco-careers-uk.com, nhscareers.help, etc.) and runs a fake recruitment process complete with interviews and offer letters. Eventually the candidate is asked for a “biometric fee” or “training deposit” payable to the agent.

4. Care-sector overseas recruitment fraud

Active throughout 2024 and 2025: brokers in West Africa and South Asia charged migrants £15,000–£25,000 each for promised UK care-worker visas. Many of the “sponsoring” providers held a real licence at the moment of payment; many had it revoked within months. Hundreds of cases are currently before the Employment Tribunal and the Home Office.

5. Fake immigration adviser

A person claiming to be a regulated adviser charges several thousand pounds for visa-application support they are not legally permitted to provide. In the UK, immigration advisers must be regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority (IAA), or be exempt as solicitors, barristers or registered chartered accountants.

Verification steps before any payment

1. Search the company on this site. A real licensed sponsor returns an “A-rated” status on the relevant route. See Sponsor licence status for what the ratings mean.
2. Verify the company’s registered address against Companies House. A “sponsor” with no Companies House presence is rarely legitimate.
3. Email the company through a domain you have independently confirmed — found via Google or Companies House filings rather than via the agent’s link.
4. Check that any recruiter is registered with the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate or a relevant trade body.
5. Check any immigration adviser at iaa.gov.uk/find-an-adviser.

Where to report a scam

• Action Fraud — actionfraud.police.uk handles reports of fraud committed in the UK.
• UKVI — provides an online reporting form specifically for fraudulent sponsorship activity. UKVI does follow up; the route is how a number of social-care licences have been revoked.
• Your bank — a minority of payments are recoverable if reported within the first 48 hours.
• National police — for fraud committed outside the UK, the relevant national reporting route applies.
• Regulated immigration adviser — a regulated adviser can explain whether the applicant may still be eligible to apply legitimately with a different sponsor.

A practical heuristic

Offers conducted entirely over WhatsApp, with payments by cryptocurrency or remittance app to a personal name and a refusal to speak by video, are consistently flagged in fraud reporting as non-genuine.

Frequently asked questions

Is it ever legal to pay an employer for a UK job offer?

No. Under the published Home Office sponsor rules, no money flows from the applicant to the employer or to an agent. Every legitimate fee is paid either by the employer to the Home Office or by the applicant to the Home Office.

How do I report a UK visa scam?

Action Fraud (actionfraud.police.uk) handles reports of fraud committed in the UK. UKVI provides an online reporting form for sponsorship-related fraud. Action Fraud reports are routed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

How do I check whether an immigration adviser is regulated?

The Immigration Advice Authority (IAA) publishes a search at iaa.gov.uk/find-an-adviser. Solicitors regulated by the SRA, barristers regulated by the BSB, and certain chartered accountants are also permitted to give immigration advice in the UK.

Can I recover money already paid to a sponsorship scammer?

Recovery is rarely complete but possible in some cases — banks may reverse payments reported within 48 hours, and chargeback rules can apply to certain card payments. Action Fraud and your bank are the first ports of call.