According to Quartz India, Samal, the 49-year-old tech CEO, was arrested on Aug. 28 upon landing at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, the (DOJ) said in a press release a day later. Samal is CEO of two technology firms starting in 2010, Samal allegedly ran a multi-year visa-fraud racket. The two Redmond, Washington-based entities he headed were IT services firm Divensi and geospatial data processing company Azimetry.

The complaint says Samal forged fraudulent letters and statements of work to get foreign nationals visas under the specialty occupation category. He made it appear as though corporate clients had agreed to use these employees when, in fact, they hadn’t. After US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved the applications based on fake documents, Samal’s firms “benched” them, leaving them unpaid until they could actually be placed at a client’s site.

Nearly 200 workers have fallen prey to this scam till now. They were even forced to pay Samal’s two companies a partially refundable “security deposit” of up to $5,000 for the visa filings—a hefty charge considering that no work or salary was guaranteed. Some comments on Divensi’s page on myvisajobs.com, a work-visa monitor, suggest that the employer usually doesn’t return the money at all.

Since its founding, Divensi has filed 1,139 labour condition applications, a prerequisite for H-1B visas; Azimetry has 929 in total.

Diane Butler of Davis Wright Tremaine law firm, who is representing Samal, has refuted these allegations. The charges laid against her client “reflect the current hostility toward business immigration in a zero-tolerance environment,” she told the Seattle Times newspaper.

If found guilty, Samal is looking at up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.