Indian medical visa fraud from Bangladesh: what the Indian High Commission itself says

Checked on 11 September 2026. Every fact on this page comes from a source we read ourselves. The link is next to the fact. If a rule changes after this date, this page may be wrong. Check the source link before you act on anything here.

The short version

The Indian High Commission in Dhaka has published a warning about people who sell visa appointment slots. Its own words:

"Any demand for extra payment for appointment slots or expedited visa delivery is fraudulent."

— Indian Visa Application Centre (IVAC) Bangladesh, Advisory on Fraudulent Visa Appointment Slot Offers (source, read 11 September 2026)

That single sentence answers most of the questions people ask us. If someone wants money to get you an appointment, or to make your visa come faster, the Indian government says that is fraud.

1. What the Indian visa actually costs a Bangladeshi citizen

There are only two money facts, and both are published by IVAC.

The Indian visa itself is free. IVAC states:

"As per the existing policy, Government of India does not charge any visa fees to citizens of Bangladesh and the Indian visa continues to remain free of charge for all Bangladeshi nationals."

— IVAC Bangladesh, visa processing fee notice (source, read 11 September 2026)

IVAC charges BDT 1,500. That is a service charge for handling the application, not a visa fee. IVAC states it was revised to "BDT 1,500 (all inclusive) with effect from 10.08.2025", and that this was the first revision since 2018 (source, read 11 September 2026).

So: nil to the Government of India, BDT 1,500 to IVAC.

Anyone who asks you for a "visa fee" is asking you to pay for something that is free. Anyone who asks for more than BDT 1,500 in government or centre charges should be asked, in writing, exactly which office receives that money.

Once you know what a scam offer looks like, the next question is what a real application looks like. We cover that in full — the visa categories, the documents IVAC publishes and every step in order — on the actual visa process, step by step.

2. "The High Commission does not have any agents"

This is not our opinion. It is a published notice, dated 3 August 2025:

"High Commission of India and Indian Visa Application Center do not have any agents. High Commission of India and Indian Visa Application Center bear no responsibility for actions of touts and agents. Do not make any payments to agents, touts, brokers or anyone offering to help you obtain Indian Visas. … Use of agents and touts could also adversely affect your application."

— IVAC Bangladesh, Beware of touts, agents and fake visa promises (source, read 11 September 2026)

The fraud advisory is more specific about how the approach is made:

"no one from the High Commission of India in Dhaka, nor from the Assistant High Commissions in Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna, or Sylhet, ever contacts applicants through personal phone calls, social media, or third-party intermediaries to offer appointment slots in exchange for payment."

— IVAC Bangladesh, Advisory on Fraudulent Visa Appointment Slot Offers (source, read 11 September 2026)

So if a phone call, a Facebook or WhatsApp message, or a person in an office says they are from the High Commission and can arrange a slot for money: the High Commission says that is not how it works.

3. The system assigns your appointment time. You do not choose it, and no payment changes it

Since 1 July 2026, appointment times at Indian visa centres in Bangladesh are given out by the computer, not chosen by the applicant. IVAC's advisory, as reported by The Daily Star:

"Time-slots shall be allotted automatically by the system in a sequential manner based on the daily configured appointment capacity of each visa application centre."

The same report adds that applicants "will not be required to manually select a time slot during appointment booking".

— The Daily Star, 1 July 2026 (source, read 11 September 2026)

Read that together with the fraud advisory. The system assigns your time; you do not pick it. And the High Commission has already told you what to think about paying for one: "Any demand for extra payment for appointment slots or expedited visa delivery is fraudulent."

We are saying this carefully, because people do get caught and we do not want anyone to feel called a liar. If you paid someone and an appointment did appear, that does not mean the payment was legitimate. It means you were charged for something the Indian government says nobody should be charging for. Section 7 has the numbers to report it.

4. If an agent files your application and it goes wrong, IVAC will not help

This is the part that costs people the most and is published in one sentence:

"It has been observed that agents are misleading bona-fide applicants with false promises and, at times, simply resorting to embezzlement. It is hereby clarified that IVAC will not assume responsibility for any outcome of a visa application handled by agents on behalf of applicants, including delay and rejection."

— IVAC Bangladesh, notice dated 30 March 2025 (source, read 11 September 2026)

If you pay an agent and the application is delayed or refused, you have no claim on IVAC. You are left with a private dispute with the agent.

That is exactly the risk to check for before you pay anyone, not after. We have 14 questions to ask before you pay anyone to arrange your treatment, built for this specific situation.

5. The medical invitation letter is the document that matters most

IVAC's own document checklist for a medical visa requires, among the general documents:

• a "Medical Invitation letter from India with specific date";
• a medical certificate in original from a recognised hospital or doctor describing the patient's condition;
• a recommendation from the attending doctor to seek treatment abroad (first visit), or from the attending doctor in India (continued treatment);
• all medical original documents;
• proof of residence, profession and finances; all old passports.

(source, read 11 September 2026. Note: this page carries an old content-management date of 16 January 2017 even though it describes a newer visa-category structure. Treat it as IVAC's published checklist as of the day we read it, and check the page again before you apply.)

Now read that alongside this advisory, dated 24 April 2024:

"Applicants seeking medical visa should visit the designated hospital only for which visa has been issued. Change of Hospital requires FRRO permission in India. Change of hospital without FRRO permission amounts to visa rules violation and may lead to restrictions on travel to India in future."

— IVAC Bangladesh, Important Advisory for medical visa (source, read 11 September 2026)

Put the two together and you get the single most useful thing on this page:

Whoever obtains your invitation letter has chosen your hospital. Your visa is tied to the hospital named on it. Changing hospital after you arrive needs permission from the FRRO (Foreigners Regional Registration Office, https://indianfrro.gov.in/frro/). Doing it without permission is described by IVAC as a violation that may restrict your future travel to India.

So before anyone arranges an invitation letter for you, ask them one question: which hospital's name will be on it? That is the hospital your visa will bind you to.

Once you have that name — or, better, an accreditation number — you can check it yourself. NABH publishes a register of accredited healthcare organisations, free and with no login. Our tool for checking an Indian hospital's NABH accreditation asks four questions about what you have actually been given and then sets out the check in order: where the register is, what the word printed beside a record means, and what the register does not contain at all. It looks nothing up for you and it sends nothing to NABH — the register is theirs, the lookup is yours, and the tool links straight to it. If you answer that you were told the accreditation covers a named treatment, it also shows you a mistake we made ourselves: we once read an institute's specialty search tags as though they were its Scope of Accreditation, and the certificate named different services. The tool names no hospital, and nothing you answer is sent anywhere.

6. What a real application looks like

IVAC publishes the process as four steps:

1. Apply online
2. Select appointment and payment
3. Submit the forms at IVAC
4. Collect the passport

(source, read 11 September 2026)

The official links IVAC itself points to:

• Online visa application form: https://indianvisa-bangladesh.nic.in/visa/index.html
• Appointment booking: https://appointment.ivacbd.com/
• IVAC Bangladesh: https://www.ivacbd.com/
• IVAC phone: 09612 333 666 and 09614 333 666

There are five centres: Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna and Sylhet (source, read 11 September 2026).

Your appointment time appears in your own appointment confirmation. It is assigned by the system. If someone shows you a slot that did not come from your own confirmation, ask where it came from.

The document list in section 5 is IVAC's, and it is not the only official list. Our Indian medical visa document checklist tool sets out what each official source publishes for one situation at a time, with the page it came from and the date we read it beside every line, and the places where those sources disagree left marked as disagreements rather than resolved for you. It is built from our requirements and attendant pages. It sends your answers nowhere and stores them nowhere, and you can print it and carry it. If what somebody tells you to bring and what the government publishes do not match, that is the thing it is for.

7. Where to report someone

These contacts are published by IVAC. We are quoting them, not adding to them.

• Phone: 01325089975 — given in the fraud advisory for reporting suspicious contact about appointment slots (source).
• Email: visahelp@ivacbd.com, info@ivacbd.com and visahelp.dhaka@mea.gov.in — given in the 3 August 2025 touts notice (source).
• IVAC also publishes a feedback and complaint form on https://www.ivacbd.com/.

8. What we do not know, and will not guess

We would rather leave a gap than fill it with something we cannot prove.

• We do not know the current number of appointment slots per day. IVAC says capacity is "configured" per centre but does not publish the number. Figures circulating on other websites did not trace to any government source, so we do not repeat them.
• We do not know how long a medical visa is valid, how many entries it allows, or how long processing takes. We did not find these on the IVAC pages we read. Ask at IVAC or check your own visa.
• We do not know how many medical attendants are allowed per patient. India's visa list includes an M-2 category "for Medical Attendants of those coming under M-1 Visa" (source), but we found no published number. Claims of a specific number are unsourced as far as we can tell. Corrected 14 September 2026. That was wrong, and on a page about fraud it was wrong in the direction that does harm: it told you to treat a specific number as a sign that somebody had made it up. IVAC's own list still prints no number. India's Bureau of Immigration, part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, does, under "Country-Specific Guidelines", and it names Bangladesh:

> "Not more than two persons shall be given Medical Attendant visas in case of > foreign nationals other than Pakistan and Bangladesh nationals." > > "Only one medical attendant shall be allowed in case of Pak nationals." > > "Three medical attendants shall be allowed in case of Bangladesh > nationals." > > — source, > read 14 September 2026

So "three" is a published government number, not an invented one. The question to ask an agent is unchanged — which page is that written on? — but this one now has an answer, and it is the address above. Our page on the medical attendant visa prints each of the different numbers India publishes, in the government's own words.

• We name no hospital and quote no treatment price on this page, because we have not verified any.

9. The rest of this series

• Indian medical visa from Bangladesh: the process — the four steps, the categories, what it costs, why appointments are the real constraint.
• Indian medical visa requirements from Bangladesh — the two official document lists, and the three ways they disagree about money.
• How many people can travel with a patient — the attendant routes, and the numbers each one publishes.
• After you arrive in India — FRRO registration, the hospital's own duty to report you, the e-Arrival Card.
• When treatment outlasts your visa — the Bureau of Immigration's one-paragraph extension rule, the blank certificate a treating hospital fills in, and the numbers it does not publish.
• Changing hospital on a medical visa — both offices say FRRO permission is required; neither publishes a form, a document list, a fee or a deadline for asking.
• Questions to ask before you pay a medical travel agent — the questions, and what a real answer looks like.

About this page

Infirmy is a marketplace. Hospitals and medical facilitators list for free and pay only per qualified lead they receive — no commission on treatment. Today it has none listed, and this page names no hospital and recommends no treatment. We are not a visa agent, we do not sell appointment slots, and nothing on this page is medical advice. If a fact on this page turns out to be wrong, we will correct it here and say when we did.

This is general information about process and paperwork, not medical advice. Infirmy does not diagnose, recommend a treatment, or tell anyone what care to seek.