The 3 Scams Fake Japan Agents Run on Indians — and the 5-Minute Check That Stops All Three

General information, not legal or immigration advice — see the note at the end.

There is a rule in Indian law that almost no one going to Japan has read, and it is the single most useful page in this whole subject.

Rule 25 of the Emigration Rules, 1983 — as substituted by the Emigration (Amendment) Rules, 2017 — does three things at once. It caps what a registered recruiting agent may charge you at ₹30,000. It then lists, item by item, what that ₹30,000 already includes — advertisements, candidate scouting, trade-test fees, attestation, interview travel, office overheads. And then it lists what must sit outside that fee, with a proviso that catches most people off guard:

"Provided that the charges under this sub-rule, except goods and services tax, shall be borne by the foreign employer."

The charges in that sub-rule are the visa fee, the pre-employment medical check-up, the air ticket to the destination country, and your boarding and lodging before deployment.

Read that again. Under India's own rules, when you are recruited through a registered agent, your flight to Japan is the employer's cost — not yours.

So when a "Japan consultant" quotes you a package in lakhs, you are not looking at a price. You are looking at a business model. And there are really only three of them.

This is the companion to our longer piece on how to verify a Japan job offer from India. That one tests whether an offer is real. This one shows you how the agent makes money — because once you can see the revenue model, the pitch stops working on you. By the end you'll have three scam shapes, one reframe that may matter more than the money, and a check you can finish in five minutes on your phone.

Key takeaway: the three scams are the Package (a bundled fee many times what Indian rules allow, charging you for things the rules already include or assign to the employer), the Gatekeeper (selling access to a door that is already open to you), and the Deposit (money held against you leaving). The third is the dangerous one — Japan's own published requirements for the Specified Skilled Worker route state that no security deposit has been collected and no contract has been signed which sets out penalties. Paying one doesn't just cost you money; on the government's own criteria it can put your eligibility at risk. And no fee paid to an agent obliges a Japanese employer to hire you.

First, the structural fact nobody tells Indian families

Most Indian households have a mental model of overseas jobs built on the Gulf: an agent, a contract, an emigration clearance stamp, a Protector of Emigrants office that has at least seen the paperwork.

That model does not apply to Japan.

Under the Emigration Act, 1983, emigration clearance is required for 17 listed countries only. MEA's own page names them — Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, UAE and Yemen — and Japan is not one of them. Japan sits on the exempt list.

This is not a comment on any other destination, and it is not a warning about Japan. But practically, for you, it means: no Protector of Emigrants will read your Japan employment contract before you fly. There is no counter where a government officer checks the salary, the employer, or what you paid. The checkpoint many Indian families assume exists somewhere in the process is simply not in this corridor.

What does still apply is the part people forget: Section 10 of the Emigration Act requires anyone recruiting Indian citizens for employment abroad to register with the Protector General of Emigrants — regardless of destination. So an agent recruiting you for Japan must still hold a valid Registration Certificate, and Rule 25 still governs what they may charge. There just isn't a departure gate that will catch it if they don't.

Which is why your protection has to happen before the money moves.

Why the India→Japan corridor is being priced right now

Here's the thing about "market rates" for migration: they aren't set by the destination. They're set by the corridor.

A 2022 survey by Japan's Immigration Services Agency, reported by East Asia Forum, found that migrants from Vietnam had paid an average of ¥688,143 to migrate to Japan — while trainees from the Philippines had paid an average of ¥94,821. Same destination country. Roughly 7.3 times the price.

At ¥1 ≈ ₹0.60, that's about ₹4.1 lakh versus ₹57,000 (computed by Komichi).

Japan didn't set either number. The sending side did — how tightly recruitment is regulated at home, how many people already know someone who's done it, how much competition there is between agents. The Philippines has decades of migration governance behind it. Vietnam's corridor grew faster than its rules did.

India's Japan corridor is young and thin. As of end-2025 the Immigration Services Agency's residency tables recorded 58,999 Indians resident in Japan, of whom only 758 held Specified Skilled Worker status — we broke those down in Indians in Japan: every statistic that matters. Very few Indian families have a cousin who has already done this and can tell them what it should cost.

That gap is the product being sold. So when you hear a Japan "package" quoted in lakhs, the honest reading is: that is not a Japan price. It is a corridor price, and corridors get repriced once enough people know the rules.

Let's make you one of those people.

Scam 1 — The Package

The pitch: "All-inclusive Japan package. Training, documentation, medical, visa, ticket, placement. ₹X lakh. Half now, half before flight."

Why it works: bundling. You can't price-check any single line because nothing is itemised, and every component sounds plausible. The word "package" does the whole job.

What kills it: Rule 25 already itemised it for you — in both directions.

Already inside the ₹30,000 ceiling (Rule 25(2)) — so these cannot be billed to you as extras:

• scouting and selecting candidates
• cost of advertisements
• trade test fees, wherever applicable
• attestation charges for certificates
• domestic travel, lodging and boarding for conducting interviews
• the agent's annual bank-guarantee cost
• cancellation charges imposed by foreign employers
• the administrative cost of running their head office and branch offices

That last one is worth sitting with. The agent's rent, staff and "file processing" are, by rule, inside the ₹30,000. "Documentation charges" as a separate line is not a service — it is the fee again, wearing a different hat.

Outside the fee — and, per the proviso, to be borne by the foreign employer (Rule 25(3)):

• Embassy or consular visa fees
• pre-employment medical check-up cost
• the air ticket to the destination country
• boarding and lodging before deployment

Only the GST is yours to pay. So the arithmetic of a lawful, registered-agent recruitment looks like this:

(For comparison, the Embassy lists ₹8,650 single and ₹17,350 multiple for other nationalities — Indian nationals pay roughly a seventeenth of that. A VFS service fee also applies on top of the visa fee, which the Embassy states on the same page. JFT-Basic is listed by Prometric at ₹3,000 net, ₹3,540 gross; JLPT in India runs roughly ₹2,200–₹2,500 depending on level — see our JFT-Basic guide and JLPT in India guide.)

Now measure the corridor against the rule. That ₹4.1 lakh average from the ISA survey is nearly 12 times the maximum an Indian registered agent may lawfully collect (computed by Komichi: ₹412,886 ÷ ₹35,400 ≈ 11.7). For what the SSW route genuinely costs an Indian applicant end to end — including the costs that are real — see our SSW visa cost breakdown and the one-time move budget.

Three more rules that quietly demolish most "package" operators:

• Cash is not allowed. Rule 25(4)(a) requires service charges to be collected "only through digital payments or bank draft", and the notarised undertaking every agent must give (Annexure-I) commits them to NEFT, RTGS or approved digital transactions with "no payments shall be received in cash" — non-adherence exposing them to penalties under sections 24 and 25 of the Emigration Act. A request for cash, or for a transfer to an individual's personal UPI ID, is a rule breach before it is anything else.
• They must display the price on a board. Rule 25(5) requires every recruiting agent to display, in their premises, a board showing the maximum service charge, the mode of payment, the Pravasi Bharatiya Bima Yojana insurance charge and Pre-Departure Orientation Training. MEA's conditions for agents separately require a web portal showing registration validity, services offered, the cost of services, mode of payment and grievance remedies. Fees that exist only in a WhatsApp message fail both tests.
• Sub-agents are not permitted at all. MEA is blunt: "DO NOT deal with sub-agents as they are not permitted under the Emigration Act, 1983 and Rules", and a registered agent "shall not employ sub-agents." The friendly local person who "works with a Delhi consultancy" is outside the framework by definition — even when the Delhi consultancy is real.

The one line to remember: if the fee can't be written on a receipt with a licence number on it, and paid by bank transfer, it isn't a fee. It's a payment.

Scam 2 — The Gatekeeper

The pitch: "SSW only goes through approved channels — we're the channel." "The Embassy quota is full, we have slots." "Pay extra for priority processing."

Why it works: the process genuinely is complicated, and there genuinely are official bodies involved. The scam borrows the complexity and sells itself as the key.

What kills it — three sentences, each from a government website:

1. You may apply to employers directly. Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs sets out the SSW process plainly: after passing the skills and Japanese tests overseas, foreign nationals "conclude an employment contract with accepting organization by applying for jobs directly or receiving assistance in job searching from private employment agencies" (MOFA, Procedures Required Before Working as a SSW — see the process flowchart and its notes). Directly is the first branch of that sentence; the agency is the optional one. Which test you need is in our JFT-Basic vs JLPT N4 comparison and the level-for-each-visa map.

2. Nothing can be expedited. The Embassy of Japan in India states it on its visa page: "Visa process cannot be expedited or prioritized according to the schedule of applicants." Anyone selling speed is selling something the Embassy says does not exist.

3. The Embassy has published a warning about this exact behaviour. At the top of the same page: "Beware of Fraud! All you have to pay for visa is the visa fee and the service charge mentioned on this page. Embassy will never ask for a payment over a telephone call or an e-mail to verify documents, expedite visa process, etc." It gives an address to report to — jpemb-visa@nd.mofa.go.jp — and suggests informing the police. Japan's MOFA maintains a standing global notice about fraudulent websites, social media accounts and emails "falsely stating that they are issued by the Government and/or Embassy of Japan, in an attempt to extract payments from visa applicants."

There's a structural point underneath all three. Japan's Employment Security Act is built the opposite way round from what the Gatekeeper pitch implies: licensed placement businesses in Japan are, as a rule, paid by the hiring employer, with charging job seekers restricted to narrow categories set by ministry ordinance (Employment Security Act, English translation). In the SSW system, the support obligations sit with the accepting organisation — see the Immigration Services Agency's SSW portal. You are not the customer in that transaction.

A variant to watch for in 2026–27. Japan's Ikusei Shuro (Employment for Skill Development) system replaces technical intern training from April 2027, and pitches selling "2027 placements" are already circulating. Acceptance is expected to run through bilateral memoranda of cooperation, and on OTIT's published Ikusei Shuro MOC page as it stands today, only three countries are listed — Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. India is not among them. Note that India does have a 2017 memorandum for the older technical intern programme; on our reading, that does not automatically carry across, and this may well change. But until India appears on the Ikusei Shuro list, anyone selling India-based placements under it is selling ahead of the framework. What is actually available today is in our Ikusei Shuro guide and the SSW application process.

Fair to say out loud: none of this means "never use an agent." Registered agents and empanelled sending organisations do real work — shortlisting, interview scheduling, document preparation, sector training. The distinction isn't agent versus no agent. It's a service you chose versus a gate you were told to pay at. Our guide to the official government channels for Japan jobs shows what the open doors look like.

Scam 3 — The Deposit (this is the one that can cost you the visa)

The pitch: "A refundable security deposit of ₹X, returned after two years." Or: "Standard bond — leave before the contract ends and you repay the training cost." Sometimes it isn't called a deposit at all: it's "documentation security", "employer guarantee", or an undertaking you sign without getting a copy.

Why it works: it sounds responsible. Bonds are normal in parts of Indian hiring. "Refundable" makes it feel like escrow rather than a fee. And it usually arrives late, once you're emotionally committed.

Here's the reframe, and it's the most important thing in this article.

Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs lists what a foreign national must satisfy for Specified Skilled Worker (i) status. Alongside being over 18 and having passed the tests, the notes to its process flowchart state:

"No security deposit has been collected and no contract has been signed which sets out penalties"

"Where self-supported, fully understands the details of their responsibilities"

— Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Procedures Required Before Working as a SSW (see note ※3 beneath the flowchart)

That is not advice. It is stated as a condition attaching to the status of residence. And the second line matters nearly as much: where you are bearing costs yourself, you are expected to have been told what they are and what they're for — which is exactly what an unitemised "package" prevents.

Consider what the deposit scam actually does to you:

1. You lose the money, which in practice is rarely recoverable from an unregistered operator.
2. You may be placed on the wrong side of a published requirement for the very status you're applying for.
3. Because the payment is usually undocumented, you can't easily prove it either way.

A scam that takes ₹1 lakh is a bad month. A scam that takes ₹1 lakh and compromises your application is a bad year.

India's rules point the same way. The undertaking every registered agent must file, notarised, says in terms: "No additional expenses on recruitment shall be defrayed on intending emigrant workers." And once you're in Japan, its Labour Standards Act restricts penalty clauses and the offsetting of advances against wages — Japan's own ministry has published anonymised enforcement cases where exactly these terms were unwound and money repaid to foreign workers. We walked through those cases, and how to read a contract before signing, in spotting an exploitative employer from India.

The one line to remember: any money described as returnable later, and any clause that costs you money for leaving, is a red flag in both countries at once.

The 5-minute check

You don't need twenty minutes to disqualify most bad offers. You need five, and a phone. (If it survives all five, then run the fuller both-governments verification framework.)

Minute 1 — Is this agent on the register? Ask for the Registration Certificate number, then check the active Recruiting Agents list on emigrate.gov.in. MEA also publishes a list of unregistered agents against whom grievances have been received: 3,505 names as of October 2025, per the Minister of External Affairs' written reply in the Rajya Sabha on 30 July 2026. Read both lists honestly: appearing on the grievance list is a strong signal to walk away, but absence from it is not a clean chit — it is a complaints record, not a court verdict.

Minute 2 — Ask for the two documents nobody asks for, and the one undertaking. MEA's guidance tells prospective emigrants to "Ask the Recruiting Agent to show to you the Demand Letter and Power of Attorney from the foreign employer." Then ask to see the notarised Annexure-I undertaking on service charges. Almost no Indian applicant asks for any of these by name. A genuine agent working a genuine Japanese vacancy will know exactly what you mean. The reaction to the question is, by itself, diagnostic.

Minute 3 — Does the Japanese employer exist? Get the company's name in Japanese and look it up in Japan's National Tax Agency corporate-number registry at houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp, which shows the registered name, address and change history. Two honest caveats: sole proprietors don't have a corporate number at all, and they are common employers in fields like agriculture and food service; and registered names often differ from trading names or kana spellings. So a clean match is reassuring, and a mismatch is a question to ask — not automatically a verdict. (Four more free official Japanese databases, and the full method, are in the employer-checking guide.)

Minute 4 — Price it against ₹35,400, and refuse cash. Total everything you've been asked to pay, in every instalment, under every label. Compare it to ₹30,000 plus GST. Then check the shape of the bill: are you being charged for documentation, office processing, attestation or interview travel? Those are already inside the ceiling. Are you being charged for the visa fee, the medical or the air ticket? Under Rule 25(3) those are the foreign employer's. And pay only by bank transfer or draft, with a receipt — never cash, never to an individual's personal account.

Minute 5 — Send these two sentences. Written, not on a call, and keep the thread:

"Please confirm in writing that no security deposit is required and that the employment contract contains no penalty for early resignation."

"Please share the name of the Japanese accepting organisation and its registered support organisation, and an itemised breakdown of every amount I am being asked to pay."

Both are answerable in one email by anyone operating legitimately. Evasion, delay, "we'll discuss on call", or irritation at being asked is the answer.

One confusion to clear up: is the cap ₹20,000 or ₹30,000?

You will find both numbers on MEA's own website, and the difference matters if you ever have to argue about it.

The operative figure is ₹30,000. Rule 25 of the Emigration Rules, 1983 was substituted in full by the Emigration (Amendment) Rules, 2017 (notification G.S.R. 1510(E), December 2017), which reads: "No recruiting agent shall collect from the worker the service charges more than a maximum of thirty thousand rupees… and the recruiting agent shall issue a receipt to the worker for the amount collected." MEA's current Recruiting Agents guidelines document carries the same ₹30,000 figure, and MEA advisory circulars reproduced by Indian missions state it as ₹30,000 + GST (18%).

Several older HTML pages on mea.gov.in still carry the pre-2017 wording — "wages for forty five days… subject to maximum of Rupees Twenty Thousand" on the prospective-emigrants page and the RAs page, and "cannot be more than Rs. 20,000 per emigrant" in the complaints FAQ. Those pages appear not to have been updated after the amendment.

What this means for you, practically:

• Work to ₹30,000 + 18% GST = ₹35,400 as the ceiling. If an agent quotes that, they are quoting the current rule, not overcharging.
• Do not let anyone tell you the ceiling is higher than that, or that it doesn't apply because the destination is Japan. Rule 25 is not destination-specific.
• Keep the receipt regardless. Complaint routes work far better when there is paper.

(Rules and figures change. Verify against the current notification and MEA's pages before relying on any number here.)

What a legitimate process actually feels like

It's worth knowing the shape of the real thing, because it's less dramatic than the fake one:

• You pass a Japanese test — JFT-Basic or JLPT N4 — and a sector skills test. Nobody can do this part for you.
• You apply to employers, directly or through a service you chose, and you have a real interview, usually online. (Your rirekisho matters more than you'd expect.)
• You receive a written employment contract with a named employer, before any visa filing. You can read the wage figure and check it against Japan's minimum wage for your prefecture.
• The employer applies for your Certificate of Eligibility. It is sent to the employer, then to you.
• You submit the visa application. The government fee for Indian nationals is ₹500, plus the VFS service fee.
• Total elapsed time is months, not days. There is no seat to block.

Before you go further, sanity-check the salary you've been quoted: run it through the Japan salary calculator and the tax calculator. Take-home in Japan is meaningfully lower than the gross figure on an offer, and a number that only works as a gross-in-rupees headline is its own kind of warning. Our salaries, tax and savings guide explains the deductions, and the pension calculator covers the part most people forget to count.

If you've already paid

You are not without options, and speed helps.

• Keep everything. Receipts, bank transfers, UPI screenshots, WhatsApp threads, the offer letter, the agent's advertisements. Do not delete the chat.
• Call the helpline. MEA's 24×7 line for overseas workers is 1800-11-3090, toll-free, answered in eleven Indian languages. It was set up as the Overseas Workers Resource Centre and has since been renamed the Pravasi Bharatiya Sahayata Kendra, so you'll see both names in MEA material (OWRC).
• File on the record. Lodge a complaint with the Protector General of Emigrants via emigrate.gov.in, and register a grievance on MEA's MADAD portal. If the agent is registered, the route is meaningfully stronger — registered agents deposit a bank guarantee of ₹50 lakh as a condition of registration.
• If money moved online, file at cybercrime.gov.in and at your local police station.
• If it involved a fake "visa" payment or a site posing as the Embassy, the Embassy of Japan in India asks to be informed at jpemb-visa@nd.mofa.go.jp, and suggests reporting to the police.

One quiet advantage worth naming: while you are still in India, help is available in your own language — that helpline covers eleven Indian languages. Once you're in Japan, as we found when mapping how far English gets you there, the national labour-consultation lines run in thirteen languages, none of them Indian, so Indians are routed through English. One more reason to do the checking now, at home, where the phone call is easy.

FAQ

How do I check if a Japan job agent is genuine in India? Ask for the Registration Certificate number and check it against the active Recruiting Agents list on emigrate.gov.in, then check whether the name appears on MEA's published list of unregistered agents against whom grievances have been received (3,505 names as of October 2025). Remember also that MEA does not permit sub-agents at all, so a "representative" of a registered agency is outside the framework.

How much can a recruiting agent legally charge for a Japan job? Under Rule 25 of the Emigration Rules as amended in 2017, no more than ₹30,000, plus GST — with a receipt, collected by digital transfer or bank draft, never cash. That ceiling already covers advertisements, candidate scouting, trade-test fees, attestation, interview travel and the agent's office costs, so those cannot be added on top.

Who pays for my flight and visa if I go through a registered agent? Rule 25(3) places the embassy or consular visa fee, the pre-employment medical, the air ticket to the destination country, and pre-deployment boarding and lodging outside the service charge, with a proviso that those charges "shall be borne by the foreign employer" — only the GST is expressly yours. If you are being asked to fund your own ticket to Japan on top of a lakhs-sized fee, that is worth questioning in writing.

Do I need an agent to get an SSW job in Japan? No. Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that after passing the required tests, applicants may conclude an employment contract "by applying for jobs directly or receiving assistance in job searching from private employment agencies" (MOFA). Many people still use a legitimate service — that's a choice, not a requirement. Start with how the SSW route works from India.

Is it legal for an agent to ask for a security deposit or a bond? For the Specified Skilled Worker route, Japan's published requirements include that "no security deposit has been collected and no contract has been signed which sets out penalties" (MOFA). A deposit or penalty clause is therefore not a neutral commercial term here — it may put your eligibility at risk. Treat any request for refundable money, or any early-exit penalty, as a stop sign.

Does emigration clearance protect me when I go to Japan? Not directly. Emigration clearance applies to 17 listed countries and Japan is not among them — it sits on MEA's exempt list. Recruiting agents must still be registered under the Emigration Act to recruit for any destination, but there is no pre-departure counter that will check your Japan contract for you. Your verification has to happen before you pay.

Can anyone speed up a Japanese visa for extra money? The Embassy of Japan in India states that the "visa process cannot be expedited or prioritized according to the schedule of applicants", and warns separately that it will never ask for payment by phone or email to verify documents or expedite a visa (Embassy of Japan in India). The government visa fee for Indian nationals is ₹500, plus the VFS service fee.

Why do Japan "packages" cost lakhs when the legal ceiling is ₹30,000? Because the price reflects the corridor, not the destination or the rule. Japan's Immigration Services Agency found in a 2022 survey that average pre-departure payments varied roughly sevenfold between sending countries — about ¥688,143 from Vietnam against ¥94,821 from the Philippines (East Asia Forum). Where few applicants know the rules, the price is set by what the market will bear.

Is the "50,000 Indian workers to Japan" plan a way to get placed quickly? It's a real government framework, not a queue anyone can sell you a place in — see what the 2026 summit actually means for workers and the demand-side picture. Genuine demand and genuine shortcuts are different things.

Your next step

Do this before anything else: write down every amount you have been asked to pay, in every instalment, with the label attached to it. Then hold that list against three numbers — ₹35,400, ₹500, ₹0. The most an agent may lawfully take. The government visa fee. And what a Japanese employer may charge you for the job itself.

If your list doesn't reconcile, you haven't been quoted a price. You've been quoted a story.

And if it does reconcile — good. Spend your money on the thing that actually moves you forward: the Japanese test. Book JFT-Basic or JLPT and start there. A test result is the only asset in this process that no agent can take back, resell, or fail to deliver.

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This article is general information, not legal, immigration, tax, financial, or medical advice. Rules, fees, and figures change and vary by individual circumstances — verify the latest details with official sources (e.g. the Immigration Services Agency of Japan, the Ministry of External Affairs of India, and the relevant embassy or test body) and consult a qualified professional before making decisions. We do not name or accuse any company, agency or individual; the red flags described here are general patterns, not allegations about any particular party. Where we describe risks, we describe conduct, not people.