EB-1 USCIS criteria — how to prove that the author of a recommendation letter is really your colleague?

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1

I’m preparing a petition and ran into a question — how do you verify that a colleague who’s writing a recommendation letter is actually my colleague? There’s no information about them on the internet. How have others handled this when gathering evidence for EB-1 criteria?

2

I received a letter from someone I had worked with in Russia; he doesn’t have LinkedIn or any public profile at all. Everything went fine — the letter was on the company’s official letterhead, with the corporate email and phone in the signature. The officer doesn’t Google every referee — they check that the contact details are real and that the email domain matches the organization’s website. Being absent from the internet by itself isn’t a problem.

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3

Thanks, that calmed me down a bit. Do I have to include a phone number in the signature, or is an email with a corporate domain enough? We don’t have work phones at our company.

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4

A corporate email is enough — when I was gathering signatures for my petition, one recommender also didn’t have a phone number in their signature and it went through without questions. The officer checks that the email domain matches the company website, plus a paragraph about the signer’s qualifications — that’s sufficient for verification. If you want to be extra safe, you can attach a printout of the signer’s LinkedIn, but that’s just extra.

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5

Also add a scan of your colleague’s company ID badge as well — it’ll make it faster for the officer to verify.

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6

There’s no point in attaching a badge to the petition — USCIS doesn’t verify passes. For the signatory, a corporate email and a couple of sentences about the job title and work experience at the company are sufficient.

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7

A scan of the pass is an unnecessary extra step; USCIS verifies via the email domain and the signature text.

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8

I kinda had a similar story — one recommender was from a small regional place, with no presence on Google. A lawyer suggested adding a paragraph to the letter about the signer’s job title, hire date, and the specific project we worked on together for eight months. It went through without a single question; I applied a year and a half ago)

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