H-1B Visa: How reliable is to go to US from a consultancy and search for a job there? Also is it legal?

I am not a lawyer, but I have seen similar companies; no way to be sure if your case is the same or not.1. If the company is not paying you since day 1 you move there, it is not legal. Well, you may fly on a Saturday and they start paying you on Monday, but other than a few days for settling, they cannot hold you from starting paid work. If they do, you are entitled for them to pay your return flight.If they do pay during search, it is probably legal, even when it may be on the edge of the law...2. So, let's assume it is legal and they are paying during search. Then, they are hiring the guy as a consultant with sales skills, who needs to find customers. Title may be "software engineer" but it would be better something like "partner software engineer with employee payment".How hard it would be, how much time? Depends on the set of skills the consultant has to offer, their sales skills, and the market. The good news is that there is high demand, which makes it easier; the bad news is that it will require pretty good sales skills to sell the services without any contact in Boston before.If the skills are in high demand, 2-3 months would be a good time; if not...3. If going for it, precautions should include:- Save enough money to live for 2 to 3 months there, without payment.- The company should pay for the flight in. Don't accept exceptions - Hotel or stay should be provided. That being said, research for cheap hotels with cheap transportation to the business district, and consider those expenses in the 2-3 months.- Don't commit for an apartment rental or the like, before you have a reasonable longer term contract with the customer and having paystubs after the client search was successful.- Travel light, have as little stuff as you can live with- Never surrender your passport to anybody. Have digital copies available in an account you can access from heart.- Don't pay the company anything. ANYTHING. If they ask for any money, it is a fraud, no questions.To close: IF the company is doing it legally (while against the spirit of the law) and pays on time, it will be paying very low fares, keeping most of the income. That is not illegal, is what big companies do... But if your friend already has an H1B that can be transferred, finding a real job with a serious company with better payment is realistic and much better.Unfortunately, it may also not pay on time, or worse...

Filing an H1B without an actual offer is illegal, regardless of whether or not he gets paid from day 1. Your friend must have a job before the company files the H1B. How long it takes to find a job depends on the skill set and demand. For example, as of now the demand for IT and business professionals in Silicon Valley is huge. When filing H1B with consultancies, you must watch out for: Consultancies that make you pay for the H1B filing and/or attorney fees. It is illegal to make you pay for your own H1B and it is the sponsoring company's responsibility to pay for these fees. Consultancies that have a history of H1B denials of RFE (Request for Evidence) due to being under scrutiny by USCIS Consultancies that want to file 2 or more H1B petitions for the same job through their subsidiaries. This is considered duplicate applications and  it is illegal and will result in you getting both petitions rejected. Consultancies that do business with small boutique client companies. You should instead look for http://www.h1bullet.com/h1b-consultant-list/?qr=consult-legal. Additional comments:I would say that in general, filing H1B via consultants is a great option because it is difficult to find companies that want to sponsor you directly. However, it is important to do things right from the start. This means that you should not engage with consultants that are scammers (you can identify them based on the items I mentioned  to answer your question #3). You should only deal with http://www.h1bullet.com/h1b-consultant-list/?qr=consult-legalDefinitely do your research before committing to any consultant. You may want to give it a shot by calling these consultants for example. The other thing to remember is: there will be an H1B lottery! You should find ways to increase your chances of winning the lottery. For example by getting an advanced degree or filing multiple applications with different H1B consultants.

Your best bet is to come to the US via the academic route. Come for a masters at a top school and then your life will be much much better later on. Your likelihood of getting sourced by recruiters at Google, Facebook, etc is way higher, your base salary will also be closer to $200,000/yr if you go that route and have the patience to spend 2 years at a top school.  They will also process your H1-B and if you get caught in the lottery madness, they'll temporarily relocate you to their UK/Canada office for a year to retry H1-B the following year. If you come through via Infosys/TCS or some other visa scam (aka constanc−−−−yconstanc̲yconsultancy) from Hyderabad or anywhere in Andhra Pradesh (India) with a bachelors from some completely random unknown college then nobody will care about you, you are on your own and will get bounced around without any guarantees or support system. Going to a top school has all kinds of advantages  - funding is much easier to get at a top school (they have way more resources than a low ranked random school)  - the network effects are massive  - people at top schools build really important connections (with their classmates). These people will lands jobs at Linkedin, Google, Facebook, etc at high salaries and you'll always have the inside track via a personal referral as an option if you want to switch jobs at any point  - if you surround yourself with smart people you'll have access to all the success they get. For e.g. all the Stanford/Berkeley graduates learned about Twitter and Facebook before anyone else and lots of them were hired by the truckload -- all of them are millionaires today. The guy who came from bumfuck university in andhra pradesh via a consultancy (aka visa scam) is still being evaluatedevaluatedevaluated (based on need and performance) for greencard processing at some small firm in wyoming or wichita or arizona and even if they decide to process it they'll argue if the $1500 fee for premium processing is really necessary. The choice is really yours. The price of admission into the millionaires club is simply that you graduate from a top school.

Hope this helps - https://beta.cironline.org/reports/visa-fraud-in-us-tech-industry-relies-on-falsified-job-letters/

It's against the letter and spirit of H1B visa laws. I am afraid such actions only make it harder for genuine people to get visas legally.