Exclusive: Inside Canada’s Diaspora Extortion Pipeline—How Organized Crime Fraud in Student Visas, International Schools, and Mass Migration Became a Recruiting Stream for Shooting Squads

A Bureau investigation traces how designated learning institutions and immigration consultant networks are allegedly being exploited.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre posted this screenshot on X Thursday, sharing a 21-second video he said shows extortionists firing at a home in Brampton. Source: X

OTTAWA — Canada’s spiraling extortion crisis targeting Indo-Canadian communities is being driven by international organized crime that has exploited a whole industry of designated learning institutes and immigration consultant shops through massive fraud, coercing vulnerable student migrants into serving in extortion squads that are terrorizing families and businesses, with brazen shootings now occurring on a near daily basis in Surrey, B.C., the epicenter of a national security threat now spreading through communities in Toronto, Edmonton, and Winnipeg, The Bureau’s investigations have revealed.

Pulling together accounts from multiple sources—predominantly from British Columbia’s new multi-agency anti-extortion task force—along with documentary and data analysis, The Bureau’s findings suggest Ottawa lost control of its national borders during a massive increase of immigration under the Trudeau Liberals, and now lacks the capacity to counter rampant scams tainting major sectors of the Canadian economy tied to immigration, the education of foreign students, and the industry surrounding their ultimate goals of job placements leading to Canadian citizenship.

Among a myriad of causes, Canada’s permissive immigration systems and lack of racketeering, foreign interference, and strong sentencing and deportation laws have made the nation a magnet for transnational gangs that exploit and leverage diasporas.

It’s a wave of exploitative crime already well-documented in Chinese diaspora communities across Canada for decades, where human smugglers known as snakeheads have leveraged illegal migrant communities into underground parallel economic sectors that now manifest in election interference and many facets of Chinese hostile state operations.

The same phenomenon is now proliferating across Indian communities in Canada, documents and government sources confirm.

But the facts allegedly discovered over the past few months by B.C.’s task force point to new corporate and immigration fraud drivers of the crisis, which is destabilizing whole cities, The Bureau’s primary source asserted in multiple interviews in January.

As a result, they said, even after British Columbia stood up a multi-agency task force last September, countering the student shooter squads has shown no progress.

In known cases, these squads are believed to be tasked by higher-level criminals working allegedly under Indian government direction.

“We just have no capacity to police this, and now we’re just living it out on the streets every day in Surrey and in Brampton,” said the investigator who has decided to come forward as a whistleblower.

“And it’s also happening in Edmonton and in Winnipeg. We’ve got an immigration and designated learning institute problem that’s way out of control. We’ve got these kids walking the streets, shooting up houses.”

As a result, the exploited South Asian community is increasingly losing confidence in Canada’s ability to uphold the law.

“A lot of people have just stopped reporting threats to police,” the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivities of ongoing investigations, said. “Or in many cases, I’m hearing of people living in hotels and they’re footing the bill for themselves, or they’ve left the country.”

The problem has exploded into media coverage and political commentary. In late 2025, B.C.’s Law Society warned its members that lawyers were being targeted by extortion gangs.

On Wednesday, police in British Columbia confirmed that 16 extortion files were reported in the first 15 days of January, including three shootings. Of the 12 victims, 10 were “repeat” victims from the previous year.

On Thursday, across the country, pointing to Brampton—a predominantly South Asian community west of Toronto—Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre posted an equally shocking video.

The footage shows a slim individual wearing a dark hoodie and light-colored track pants awkwardly jogging toward a large suburban home with a three-car garage and a black truck parked in the driveway. The person stops near the driveway, extends their arm, and appears to fire about eight shots; muzzle flashes are visible during the firing sequence. The clip appears to be filmed from inside a vehicle with a shaky, handheld phone camera.

“Extortionists in Brampton are so unafraid of the law that they actually film themselves shooting up homes and then share the video!” Poilievre commented, posting the video to X.

Last week, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown called on provincial and federal authorities to support a specialized extortion task force in Ontario, explicitly urging a model and funding approach mirroring British Columbia’s.

But as The Bureau’s source on the B.C. task force confirmed in recent interviews, the scale of the problem has now snowballed beyond government control, and even the tasking of about 50 officers from multiple police agencies and the Canada Border Services Agency hasn’t had a measurable impact.

In fact, the source acknowledged, the extortion and shooting squads appear to be growing only more brazen and numerous.

The investigator’s point about public exhaustion has an on-the-record analogue in Jinny Sims, the former B.C. MLA and South Asian radio host whose workplace was itself hit by gunfire. In a media interview, she warned that an attack on a media outlet felt like a new line had been crossed.

To quickly get a handle on this complex story of government failures, it is best to briefly headline some of the most shocking data points.

In normal circumstances, these numbers, absent the evidence of shooters posting clips of their extortion in B.C. and Ontario on a near-daily basis, might be hard to believe.

In Surrey alone, The Bureau’s source said, there are about 25 designated learning institutions, effectively tied to hundreds of immigration consultant storefronts, with actors looking for marks to exploit in Canada and India.

The designated learning institutes and immigration storefronts are often clustered together in malls that appear to concentrate organized crime actors who have learned to monetize the exploitation of migrants into a range of underground economies.

Into that churn of human exploitation, the primary source asserted, organized crime is trafficking a range of Canadian government documents needed for employment and citizenship services—fraudulently created and marketed like currency—with some of the most sought-after documents typically selling for about $10,000, and in some cases as high as $45,000.