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Preying on Ambition: The Regulatory Void of Overseas Education Consultancies in Pakistan
Selling a student a forged admission letter is not an ordinary fraud. The fraudster promises admission, a scholarship, or a visa to gain the family’s trust, and then deceives them. They prey on the best thing a hard-working student has – ambition. However, Pakistan treats it like any other cheating. The harm goes beyond the families losing the land they own, their lifetime savings and years of effort. Sometimes it costs a life and the country loses the constituents of its future.
This is not an anomaly. Nationwide, families sell land, pawn gold, and spend their savings so that a son or daughter can study abroad. Education consultants advertise on social media and promise to place students in universities abroad. The student has a dream, the family has made a sacrifice. However, there is no way to check whether the offer is genuine, because the country appears to have no system for it. Law punishes the fraudulent only after families have lost everything. To solve this issue Parliament should pass a licensing law for education consultants, and should do it soon. The recent case of Laiba Ijaz shows why: the tragic suicide of brilliant physics gold medalist after she and her family were defrauded of millions of rupees by a fraudulent education consultant. [1]
According to Laiba’s family, a fake educational consultant named Muhammad Nauman convinced the family of the promise of a scholarship and admission to Harvard University, along with the US visa. Believing his claims, the family handed over Rs 9.3 million to fund her studies. [2] However, the scam was exposed when all the scholarship letters and admission letters and fee receipts provided by the consultant were discovered to be entirely fabricated. [1]
The FIA registered FIR under sections 419, 420 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code, read with sections 18 and 22 of the Emigration Ordinance, 1979. [3] Islamabad police registered a separate case over Laiba’s death under section 322 and 34 of Pakistan Penal Code.[1]
Section 419 punishes cheating by personation (pretending to be someone else). It fits the FIA’s description of an impersonation scam, in which the suspects allegedly used fabricated online identities and a fictitious US-based persona to deceive the family. Section 420 punishes cheating that dishonestly induces a person to hand over property. It relates to the fraudulent extraction of Rs 9.3 million under false pretenses. Section 109 punishes for abetment (aiding, conniving, or conspiring to commit a crime). This fits the allegation that multiple accused individuals worked in active complicity with one another to execute the scam. Section 322 describes as causing death without intention, where a person commits an unlawful act that becomes the direct cause for another person’s death. The psychological distress, financial ruin and deception by the suspects are legally treated as the direct cause that drove Laiba to take her own life.
All the sections stated above let the state prosecute and punish the convicted by asking them. Did the accused deceive the family? Did the victim or their family hand over property? But neither of them asks whether the accused was a licensed and registered consultant, or whether the victim had any way to verify. These same sections could be applied to a cheat selling a stolen car. They do not recognise the specific harm of a false offer of education sold to a family that had staked its lifetime savings on it. The Emigration Ordinance 1979, which regulates overseas employment suggests that no education specific law was available.
This alone is not an isolated case. In July 2026, FIA arrested a man in Sialkot who ran an agency called Broadway Consultancy. According to FIA, he allegedly lured students with promises of admission to University of Nevada, Reno and HEC funded scholarships. He collected US$10,000 from each victim. However, upon the verification by HEC the documents were declared to be fake. FIR was registered under sections 420, 486 and 109 of Pakistan Penal Code. [4]
Moreover, in September 2026 the FIA arrested the CEO of an Islamabad consultancy in a UK student visa case. The victim allegedly lost a £4,000 deposit.[5] The FIR was filed under section 18 and 22 of the Emigration Ordinance, with sections of 420, 506 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code. The consultant stated that his agency only provided the tuition payment link to Teesside University and that he expected the student to manage and submit her own final visa documentation. [6] However, the allegations are contested. The dispute still has a problem. There is no rule that states who bears the loss, who holds university fees or how local cash deposits must be secured. Section 420 appears to be in the three cases mentioned above. The Emigration Ordinance is adopted in two of them. It must be noted that in each case the law acted after the money was gone hence, education consultancies operate in a legal gray area.
The devastating incident of Laiba’s revealed a profound reality in Pakistan: the lack of a preventative government framework to safeguard the families dealing with the international education sector. This regulatory void appears to be worsening the helplessness of a student.
Under the current system, families are unable to check the consultant legitimacy because the state provides no method to do so. While the HEC regulates the foreign degree programmes operating in Pakistan, it holds no authority to approve or regulate consultants marketing admission abroad. Consequently, the only practical guidance families can find on verifying a firm comes from private consultancies – advising them to ask whether the firm is registered, whether it uses Pakistani business bank accounts or any recognised university admission panels. Parents are forced to bet blindly on private reputations rather than following advice from the Parliament.
No regulatory framework receives complaints about consultants because no rule requires them to have written contracts, exclusive banking channels or transparent refund terms. This permits a financially rewarding cash economy to expand without any data track. In Laiba’s case, this failure proved that out of RS 9.3 million defrauded from her family, only Rs 2.9 million went from a bank account. [3] The remaining Rs 6.4 million was paid in untraceable cash, stripping the family’s savings without prompting a single automated warning sign within the banking sector. Once the deception is uncovered, victims reach the FIA. Criminal law is designed in a way that punishes the culpable party, it lacks any measures to help the victim get their stolen money restored.
To bridge these regulatory gaps law must make a public registry and ban on unlicensed advertising. The regulator should run a website which would list every licensed agency, its address and its real owners. Advertising without a license should be considered an offence, even if the person did not intend to violate the law. This would help the family to pay no one who is not on the list. In addition to this, illegal ads should be taken down quickly.
Secondly, consultancies must be licensed by activity. Anyone who takes a fee or commission for admission, visa or scholarship services needs a license to practice. Even when the fraudster skips the registry, or who poses as an official, performing the unlicensed activity itself becomes an immediate, arrestable offense. This would enable the police to act at once before a student loses money.
To protect legitimate business from unfair liability, every agency must give a written agreement that sets out what it will do. By codifying exact operational duties in writing, the law acts as a shield for honest consultants, for example if the agent provides the correct university payment link but the student fails to submit their visa documents or misses a personal deadline, the consultant would not be held liable for the loss.
There must be digital banking trails and funded inspections. All tuition and deposit payments through formal corporate banking channels, not cash, so there is always a record. Furthermore, an online portal for complaints must be set. Every licensed agent must also hold a bond, so a family is quickly paid if the agent defaults. It must be noted that education is mostly a provincial subject after the 18th amendment of Pakistan, so the law should begin in Islamabad Capital Territory so it can serve as a model for other provinces.
Some may argue that a fraudster or scammer will not simply register, making a licensing system useless against clever impersonators. However, this argument overlooks how a public registry fundamentally transforms public safety by giving families a single rule to follow: pay no one who is not on the list. Some may also object that a licensing system is useless if no one checks on it, meaning this law will just become a useless piece of paper. This can be largely fixed by making the system pay for itself. All the cash collected from license fees and heavy fines taken from the caught scammers can go directly into a special fund to pay for the team. As shown by the UK Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner, a regulator suffers when the money it collects does not stay with it. It runs mainly on a yearly government grant, and the fees it collects are sent back to the Home Office. Years of flat grants then put it under heavy budget pressure. The Home Office has since proposed higher fees so that the scheme can pay for itself. Pakistan can avoid this by making the law keep all fees and fines in the regulator’s own fund. Finally, some may claim that this law will unfairly punish honest consultants if a university keeps a deposit. However, the law explicitly prevents this by using the mandatory written contracts to set a clear legal boundary where the agent’s liability ends and the student’s responsibility begins.
Parliament should treat licensing law urgently as there is a steady flow of complaints leaving families exposed to the same risk. A licence will not end fraud. However, it will make fraud harder to start and easier to stop. A student who works hard and dreams of studying abroad should not have to worry about the family’s land, gold and savings on a consultant’s word.
Bibliography:
[3]https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2026/10/10/fia-registers-fir-in-laiba-ijaz-suicide-probe-case
[4]https://www.dawn.com/news/2018127
[5]https://thepienews.com/pakistani-education-consultant-arrested-over-deposit-withheld-by-uk-uni/
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the views of LEAP Pakistan or Pakistan College of Law.
