OEP Licence Check: 888 Licences Have Been Cancelled

Your Agent’s Licence Number Might Be Real — and Still Worthless. Here’s How to Check.

A man in Gujrat is shown a licence number on a letterhead. He checks it. The number is real. He pays.

Six months later he learns the licence was cancelled in 2019.

That is not a story about a clever forgery. It is a story about a check that was done correctly and still failed, because almost nobody in Pakistan knows that a licence number and a valid licence are two different things.

As of 9 August 2026, the Bureau of Emigration & Overseas Employment lists 5,252 Overseas Employment Promoter licences in total — but only 2,787 are valid. The rest are cancelled (888), expired (707), surrendered (836) or invalid (10). A genuine licence number therefore proves nothing on its own. You must check its current status.

The number nobody quotes

Go to the BE&OE homepage and scroll to the OEP licence statistics. The counter is public, live, and it is the single most useful thing on the site.

The Bureau’s own figures show 2,787 valid licences, 10 invalid, 888 cancelled, 707 expired and 836 surrendered, out of 5,252 in total.

Do the arithmetic. Roughly 47 per cent of every OEP licence number ever issued is no longer usable. Nearly one in two.

Now think about what a dishonest operator does with that. He does not invent a number — invented numbers fail the first check. He uses a real one belonging to a firm that cancelled, expired or surrendered its licence years ago. When you type it in, something comes back. Something looking official. And you stop checking there.

The status field is the whole test. [internal link: Protector of Emigrants 2026 fees and QR payment]

What BE&OE did in the first week of August

This is not an abstract risk. The regulator publishes its enforcement actions publicly, and the first week of this month produced five.

On 6 August 2026, BE&OE published the suspension of the licence of M/s Fahmida Recruiting Agency, OEPL No. 1010/KAR.

On 5 August, it published a refusal of the renewal request for the OEP licence of M/s COTHM Manpower International, OEPL No. 2989/LHR.

Also on 5 August, personal hearing notices were issued to M/s Linker Trade International (OEPL No. 2495/KAR), M/s Jobs Wright Recruitment Services (OEPL No. 4834/RWP) and M/s Abdul Gaffar & Sons Overseas Employment (OEPL No. 3182/RWP).

These three notices are not findings of wrongdoing. A personal hearing notice is a summons — the firm is being called to answer something. It may be resolved entirely in the firm’s favour. We are listing them because the notices are public and because a worker currently dealing with any of these firms deserves to know a proceeding exists, not because any conclusion has been reached.

The two above them are different. A suspension and a refused renewal are actual adverse licence outcomes.

The Bureau also closed a batch of complaints against several promoters on 9 August, including M/s Al-Baraka Enterprises, M/s Anchor Manpower Services and M/s Faisal Usman Overseas Employment Promoters. A closure means the complaint process finished — again, not a verdict against the firm.

If those distinctions feel fussy, they are exactly the distinctions a WhatsApp forward will flatten into “these agencies are banned.” Do not forward that message. Send people to the source.

How to actually run an OEP licence check

Five minutes, no cost, no middleman.

Step 1 — Get the OEPL number in writing. Not verbally, not from a signboard. From the letterhead or the contract. It looks like 1234/LHR — a number plus a city code.

Step 2 — Open the BE&OE list of OEPs. The page lets you filter by status: active, invalid, cancelled, expired, surrendered, or all. Search your number under active first.

Step 3 — If it does not appear under active, search “all.” This is the step people skip. If the number appears under cancelled, expired or surrendered, you have your answer, and it is not the one the agent gave you.

Step 4 — Match the name, not just the number. The licence belongs to a registered company name. If the number is valid but the office you are sitting in trades under a different name, you are dealing with someone using another firm’s licence — which is its own offence.

Step 5 — Check the news updates page. Suspensions and hearing notices appear there before the main list always catches up. If your promoter’s name is on that page this month, ask about it directly.

The two checks that catch what a licence check misses

Here is where this article stops repeating what other pages say.

A licensed promoter can still send you to a bad employer. BE&OE knows this, and it publishes two more lists that virtually nobody in Pakistan reads.

Blacklisted foreign employers. Companies abroad that BE&OE has barred from recruiting Pakistani workers. If your job offer is from a firm on that list, a valid OEP licence does not save you.

Blacklisted technical trade centres. Trade test and training centres whose certificates BE&OE does not accept. If you are paying for a trade test certificate — for Saudi, for Korea, for anywhere — and the centre is blacklisted, you have bought paper. [internal link: Saudi skill verification test 2026]

Both lists are on the same site as the licence list. Check all three before money moves. Not after.

The demand letter is the document that matters

A licence tells you the promoter is allowed to recruit. It does not tell you that this particular job exists.

Under the system, a promoter must obtain BE&OE permission to process a specific foreign demand — a real vacancy from a real employer. A legitimate promoter recruiting for a real job has been through that process. Ask which foreign employer the demand is registered against and whether permission has been granted for it.

BE&OE also publishes a foreign jobs board directly. As of 9 August it listed 205,431 total foreign jobs, of which 105,673 remained available and 99,758 had been filled.

Read those numbers carefully, because they cut against the most effective line in the scammer’s script. Over a hundred thousand vacancies are sitting unfilled on a government website right now. Nobody needs to pay a bribe to be squeezed into a “limited quota” that is closing tonight. Urgency is the pitch, not the reality.

After you pay: verify your own registration

One more free tool, and it is the one that protects you at the airport.

BE&OE operates an emigrant registration verification portal. Once your protector registration is done, you can check that it exists in the system under your own CNIC. If your agent says the protector stamp is “arranged” but nothing appears in the portal, nothing has been arranged.

Since 16 July 2026 the protector fee has also been payable through a QR-based cashless system launched with the National Bank of Pakistan, which removed one of the easiest places for a worker to be overcharged in cash. If someone is still asking you for cash for the protector fee, that is a question worth asking loudly. [internal link: protector of emigrants fee structure]

Scale, so you know you are not being paranoid

The system is enormous, and enormous systems attract predators.

During 2026 up to July, 356,674 Pakistanis proceeded abroad for employment, and more than 10 million emigrants have been registered through the Bureau since 1971 — with the single highest year being 2015, when 946,571 people went.

Against those volumes, a few thousand rupees extracted from each hopeful applicant is an industry. The regulator’s enforcement stream — suspensions, hearings, complaint closures, week after week — is what that industry looks like from the inside.

If you have already been defrauded

Do not go quiet out of embarrassment. There are three separate doors, and they work at different speeds.

BE&OE complaints. File directly against the promoter. This is the route that produces the licence actions described above.

The illegal recruitment channel. BE&OE maintains a dedicated page for unlicensed operators — people acting as promoters with no licence at all. Different offence, different process.

The Grievance Commissioner for Overseas Pakistanis, and for criminal conduct, the FIA. Human smuggling and fraudulent visa dealing are criminal matters, not customer-service complaints.

Bring documents: receipts, the contract, screenshots of messages, the licence number you were given. A complaint with paper behind it moves. A complaint that is only a story usually does not.

The one-sentence version

If you remember nothing else from this page: a licence number is a question, not an answer. The status attached to it is the answer, it is published free by the government, and checking it takes five minutes.

Key Takeaways

• Only 2,787 of 5,252 OEP licences are valid. 888 are cancelled, 707 expired, 836 surrendered, 10 invalid.
• A real licence number can belong to a dead licence. Always check the current status, not just existence.
• BE&OE published five enforcement notices in the first week of August 2026 — one suspension, one refused renewal, three personal hearing notices.
• A hearing notice is a summons, not a verdict. Do not repeat it as a ban.
• Check three lists, not one: OEP licences, blacklisted foreign employers, blacklisted trade test centres.
• Over 105,000 foreign vacancies were listed as available on the government jobs board — “limited quota, pay tonight” is a sales tactic.
• Verify your own protector registration in the verification portal after paying.
• Protector fees are payable cashless by QR since July 2026. Cash demands deserve questions.

FAQ