If you're a rural meatworker from Taiwan or China, you might have heard about Tia.
Word might have come through a co-worker, or a friend, or a friend of a friend.
You'll likely have heard about how she's helped students, workers, and working holiday makers obtain visas and eventually permanent residency in Australia.
Few have met her in person. Fewer still have a phone number. She does business mostly in messaging apps like WeChat or Line, or over the phone.
"She only keep saying, 'You have to trust me' … We can help you," says Zoe*, a former client.
Tia exists in the cracks and flaws of our migration system, offering to help desperate temporary migrants stay in Australia.
She's not cheap. She sometimes charges more than $100,000.
Tia's clients — many working low-paid, physically demanding jobs — are left to beg and borrow from friends and family to pay her high fees.
They live in a kind of visa limbo, and they are speaking out at great risk to themselves. For this reason, we are not using their actual names.
Many learn in the end that the dream Tia sells amounts to very little. They're left broke, without a visa, and with the risk of being kicked out of Australia, while Tia ghosts their messages and moves on to her next client.
From Taiwan to the killing floor
At the edge of a small, flat town in rural Australia, there's a paddock ringed with a tall barbed wire fence. Inside a group off-white sheds, sheep and lambs are being slaughtered.
In the packing and sizing shed, Bella* looks for lumps in meat.
As she finds them, she trims them out.
Bella grew up in Taiwan. She first arrived in Australia several years ago. Back then she was a wide-eyed backpacker.
Everywhere she looked she saw big houses — straight out of an American movie — and blue sky.
"Wow, I really come to a Western country," she remembers thinking. "And not very crowdy, not many people. I love that."
A few months after Bella arrived, her high-school best friend Zoe followed her.
Bella and Zoe hopped from job to job. There was a masseuse's job on the Gold Coast, but it was not what it seemed.
"The massage shop is not a good one," says Bella.
"They do the like, hand job. So we were scared. We tell our boss we don't want to do this."
They ended up at an abattoir in northern Victoria.
When their working holiday visas expired, the women returned to Taiwan. But it wasn't long before they made their way back to Australia, and Bella went back to abattoir work.
In 2020, Bella applied for a protection visa. She could work full-time while she waited for the outcome of her application, but when it was rejected she was told she had 28 days to leave the country.
It was around this time she heard about Tia.
The $100,000 visa
In online messages and over the phone, Tia and her assistant assured Zoe and Bella that they could get them both work visas.
Tia claimed to know people with close ties to Australian officials, politicians and businesses.
She said she had connections in courts and the Department of Immigration, and that those relationships could speed up the whole visa process.
"She say she got a professional team," says Bella.
"She told me 'Don't worry, you can get a working visa … and then you can apply to be permanent resident.' … She give me hope."
But in the visa game, hope is expensive.
Bella and Zoe were quoted $100,000 each for sponsored work visas.
When they said they couldn't afford to pay that much, Tia agreed to give them a discount — $79,000 each. She promised an even bigger discount if they brought her more customers.
But even with the discount, Bella was struggling. So Zoe lent Bella $30,000.
Tia also gave Bella a payment plan — $10,000 up front, then a further $30,000 after confirmation her application had been received by the Department of Home Affairs.
The remaining $39,000 could be paid in instalments.
Bella and Zoe were on board, and transferred $10,000 to Tia's company's bank account.
In online chats, via messaging apps seen by Background Briefing, Tia's assistant cautioned Bella against writing "visa" in her bank transfer remarks.
Tia got to work, sending Bella an "acknowledgement" letter that her work visa nomination had been received by the Department of Home Affairs.
But there was something strange — the area on the letter that contained a contact email was blacked out.
When she asked Tia, Bella was told the email account was managed by her company's lawyer and that it contained lots of peoples' information.
She also told Bella not to check her online Immigration account.
With Bella instructed not to access her own application, it left her entirely in Tia's hands.
'Australian passport is waiting for you'
Each day brought Bella closer to her visa expiry date. But when they asked Tia about this, she was unconcerned.
Tia told her to ignore the 28-day deadline.
"Come on, the Australian passport is waiting for you," Tia told Bella in one exchange online.
"Hurry up and send me the form and pay slip, sorry to keep pushing you as it is really an urgent situation."
But Zoe was starting to have doubts. Tia was encouraging Bella on a pathway to permanent residency that seemed unconventional.
Eventually Bella asked Tia for a refund, but it never came. Tia stopped answering her messages and Bella never heard from her again.
Word starts to spread
Among the close-knit community of Taiwanese and Chinese temporary workers, word was starting to spread about Tia's business practices.
Jack, a friend of Bella and Zoe's, had paid Tia $40,000. Another woman, Cindy, paid just over $14,000. And another, named Lisa, had handed over $50,000.
They all knew Tia by different names. To some she was Nana or Sasa. Others knew her as Nana-Sasa, or Nana-Carina.
Her real identity is hidden behind online nicknames in social messaging apps.
But all the evidence points to this being the same person who owned a network of companies, all taking money from her temporary migrant clients.
Most only ever spoke to her online. But a couple met her in person.
"She had a very good personality, that's why everybody trust her", says Khalil, a Chinese national who knew her as Nana, and tried to get permanent residency through her when he was in Australia.
Wayne also met her as Nana over lunch at a hotel. He remembers a fast-talking and convincing woman, who sold him on the dream of permanent residency.
"She was very confident and professional, and when you listen to her speaking, you just thought, 'She's so capable.'"
The voice messages
Within the temporary migrant community, Tia's reputation grew.
And her former clients weren't just trading stories.
Recordings and voicemails were swapped online. These have been shared with the ABC, and transcribed by the ABC's Mandarin-speaking reporters.
"What you are doing in Australia is buying an employer's sponsorship," she tells one client in a voice recording.
"Selling and buying an employer's sponsorship in Australia is a sensitive matter. If a very dangerous situation arises, it is really possible to go to jail, for both the employer and for you."
In another, she boasts about the relationship she has with immigration officials.
"If the officials ask for proof of overseas employment, it's possible to just pay $40,000 to get them to help you prepare the documents, because they themselves also don't want to accumulate cases," she says.
"These officials are our officials, I should say."
Tia also incentivises her clients to recruit more customers, and in return she offers a generous cut of the profits.
"You referred a friend to us earlier," she says to one client.
"I don't know if you have told her that it would cost $79,000 to get to the meat factory. If she doesn't know, then I can let you earn some money from this deal. We will tell her the fee is $100,000, and you guys can take the excess."
Some former clients managed to track down Tia's passport number, and it was passed on to the Taipei Economic and Cultural office – Taiwan's de facto embassy in Australia.
They discovered that Taiwanese authorities are trying to find Tia too.
In an email to the ABC, a Taiwanese official describes Tia — using her Chinese-language name — as a "wanted" person in connection with a banking and fraud investigation in Taiwan.
He says Tia left Taiwan and travelled to Singapore in 2021, and they have been trying to track her down since. Taiwan has also appealed to Australian authorities for help in trying to find her.
However, the ABC is not aware of the nature of the allegations in Taiwan or the evidence behind them. They also haven't been tested in court.
'Shut it down'
Bella doesn't know the extent of the service she got for the $40,000 she paid Tia.
She received an "acknowledgement" letter on a Department of Home Affairs letterhead, but she simply doesn't know whether it was formally filed or not.
Independent checking shows that there were serious problems with Bella's application, even if it was submitted.
An ASIC search of company names reveals there are two entities that match the name of the business that is listed as a sponsor on Bella's acknowledgement letter.
However, company records show one was deregistered at the time the application was made.
And when contacted by the ABC, the director of the other said he had no idea his company had been used as a work sponsor, and never would have allowed it.
"It's crazy that that could come about without even consulting myself," he said.
"I had no idea. I would have just shut it down if I thought something like that could happen."
Background Briefing has made numerous attempts to contact Tia and has sent her questions about her business practices, however a lawyer working for her said she would be unable to answer the questions because they would lead her to violate confidentiality obligations.
The lawyer said Tia was currently facing significant mental health challenges, receiving medical treatment and was hard to contact.
He said she was having a number of contractual and commercial disputes with former clients who had threatened to go public if she didn't give them a refund. He also said that she was lodging defamation proceedings against a former client whom she believed had spoken to the ABC, questioning his credibility.
The broken system
Abul Rizvi came across many "Tia"s during his time as deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration.
He says Australia's low-paid migrant worker schemes have created an environment where temporary migrants can be exposed to opportunistic agents.
He says a 2014 leadership shake-up within the then Department of Immigration and Border Protection led to "such a large exodus of experienced migration officers that the department simply did not have the capacity to manage the visa system with any degree of integrity".
Dr Rizvi says policy shifts in 2017 and 2019 also created bottled-up demand among temporary migrants hoping to stay.
Today, there's widespread concern that Australia has become a "guest worker society", with temporary migrants who work, pay taxes, and play a crucial role in the economy but have little prospect of being allowed to stay.
"Both the Labor Party and the Coalition are, I believe, to blame," he said.
"[They] have introduced visa categories that simply are high-risk without putting in the appropriate protections.
"I think governments just took their eye off the ball."
As Tia was collecting large sums of money from her clients, in Canberra, a review was being worked on to try and tighten Australia's visa system.
In a speech to the National Press Club last month, Home Affairs Minister Claire O'Neil announced an overhaul to Australia's immigration system following an extensive review.
"Our immigration system is suffering from a decade of genuinely breathtaking neglect. It is failing our businesses. It is failing migrants themselves," she said.
Mostly, she blamed the previous government for the disrepair. But she also raised the plight of migrant workers over and over again.
"Abuse of our visa system has gone unchecked," she said.
On budget night, the government allocated $50 million over four years for additional enforcement and compliance activities to maintain the integrity of the migration system.
Background Briefing asked the department about Tia, but it told us it does not comment on individual cases.
A spokesperson, however, said that the Australian government has zero tolerance for the kind of conduct we identified, regardless of their visa status, and stated that further reforms will be considered in line with its review of the migration system.
'Guess who will win?'
Bella is working three jobs to repay the debt she owes Zoe.
She is resigned to the fact that she may soon be forced to leave Australia and return to Taiwan.
"I still love Australia. I still enjoy Australian life, just unfortunately everything's happened. So I think if no way to stay, I only can go home," she says.
Zoe worries about her best friend.
"I just want her to know I can always be here when she needs me," she says.
Zoe says she's ashamed of her decision to trust Tia.
"I don't want people [who] live near me to find out what happened," she says.
Some of Tia's former clients are also concerned about what actions she may take against them.
They have a recording they say proves just how intimidating she can be.
In it, Tia speaks in Mandarin: "I collaborate with officials in Australia. If you want to ruin our reputation, I don't care.
"You can do whatever you want, I'm fine. Why? I have permanent residency. I have money. I have officials. I have lawyers … I have your personal information. If we continue the dispute, guess who will win?"
But Zoe isn't fazed by this.
"No-one will get lucky all the time," she says.
*Names have been changed.
