What an Agency May and May Not Charge

Section 58(2) of Act No. 435/2004 Coll. on Employment: an employment agency arranging employment for a fee may not require payment from the natural person for whom the employment is being arranged.

That is the whole rule and it does not have a workaround. The agency's income comes from the employer. You are not the customer.

Breach is an offence under Section 140 of the same Act, in the general clause covering mediating employment without a permit or otherwise breaching the Act or good morals in the course of placement. The fine reaches 2,000,000 CZK and is imposed by the Labour Inspectorate. Separately it can trigger revocation of the agency's licence.

We could not confirm a dedicated sub-paragraph in Section 140 specific to the fee prohibition, so we cite the general offence clause and its ceiling rather than a narrower reference.

If you have worked in the Gulf, or if your family has, worker-paid recruitment fees are simply how it works. Paying an agent several months of future income to secure a job is the normal shape of the transaction, and people arrive at the European market carrying that assumption with them.

Operators know this. It is the single most exploited assumption in the Indian and Nepali corridors, and the prosecuted cases run on it: the victim is not tricked into believing a fee is legal, because they already believe fees are normal.

Unlearning that assumption is worth more than any other single piece of information on this site.

One test, and it is reliable: who receives the money, and what for.

Every legitimate line produces a receipt from the authority or provider, not from the agency. That is the check.

Worth recognising because it is the same in almost every prosecuted case.

It starts small — a registration fee of a few thousand rupees, framed as covering paperwork. The amount is deliberately low enough not to trigger caution. Then the original passport is taken, ostensibly for processing. With the passport held, the demands escalate: medical, visa processing, employer deposit, expedited handling. Each one is small relative to what has already been paid, which is exactly why people keep paying.

In the Mumbai Star Man Power case, 180 people paid between ₹30,000 and ₹2.5 lakh each. In the Delhi Sky Visa Venture case, ₹80,000 to ₹3.5 lakh. In the Kerala case, ₹3 lakh for warehouse work in Croatia that turned into six months in Armenia with no job.

The intervention point is the passport. Never let the original leave your hands without a receipt, and preferably never at all. Everything after that is harder.

1. Get your passport back first. Before argument, before complaint, before anything.
2. Write down dates, amounts, account numbers and names while you remember them, and keep every message.
3. Check whether they were licensed — mea.gov.in/ras in India, data.mpsv.cz in Czechia. The answer changes which complaint route is open.
4. Report it to the Protector of Emigrants through eMigrate, and to the police. Late reporting is the recurring failure in every case file.
5. Tell whoever handles your next application what happened. It affects which documents you need and whether your passport is compromised.

We will look at paperwork you were given by someone else, free, whether or not you end up working with us. It takes ten minutes and it has saved people several lakh.