Short answer: stop paying immediately, keep every receipt and message, and report it. Money paid to someone overseas usually has to be recovered through the police and courts in that country, so act where the agent is as well as here.
Do these today
- Stop all further payments, however urgent the next request sounds. A scam only continues while money keeps arriving.
- Save every receipt, transfer record, message and document, including screenshots of chats and the sender addresses on emails.
- Check your own Immigration Online account to see whether any application actually exists. If it is not there, it was never lodged.
- Report the adviser to the Immigration Advisers Authority and the fraud to Immigration New Zealand.
- Report to the police in the country where you paid the money, because that is usually where any recovery has to happen.
If an application was lodged with false information
Get advice from a licensed adviser or a New Zealand lawyer before you do anything else. False or misleading information in an application has consequences for you even when an agent supplied it, and there are proper ways to correct the record.
Work out how many warning signs applied
Our free self-check lists the warning signs we see in real cases and tells you who to report to: Am I being scammed?. You can also check the employer, adviser, email address and website against the official registers with the free job offer and INZ letter checker.
You can call Immigration New Zealand from overseas on +64 9 914 4100.