By Ananya Varma

Copyright timesnownews

US President Donald Trump’s abrupt announcement of a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa holders, triggered panic among Indians abroad who scrambled to return to the United States. The White House later clarified that the new fee was a one-time payment, not retroactive, but by then, leading American companies had already urged employees overseas to fly back immediately to avoid being stranded. As Indians rushed to book tickets, far-right trolls on message boards like 4chan launched a coordinated campaign to block them. Dubbed “clog the toilet,” the campaign encouraged users to flood airline websites by starting the checkout process for India–US flights without completing the purchase, effectively choking reservation systems and making it harder for genuine passengers to secure seats, AFP reported. Vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began searching for a flight from the city of Vijayawada, but encountered repeated crashes on airline websites. The checkout page, which typically allows users a window of a few minutes, timed out much faster. After multiple attempts, she eventually managed to rebook a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, spending around $2,000 — more than double the cost of her original round-trip fare. “It was hard for me to book a ticket and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,” Tamanam told AFP. Also Read: ‘India Engaged With US On H-1B Visa Fee Hike’: MEA Shares Update On New Rules ‘Clog The Toilet’: How the online campaign targeted Indians The 4chan thread — which also circulated among far-right Trump supporters on Telegram and other fringe forums — read: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!” Responding posts, many riddled with racist slurs, advised users to hold seats for popular India-US routes on airline websites and booking platforms — without completing the purchase. Their goal was not only to block availability on high-demand flights, making it harder to find available seats and inflating prices. Illustrating the scale of the operation, one 4chan user posted a screenshot of their browser and claimed: “I got 100 seats locked.” “Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight,” another wrote, sharing images of how they were holding up seats on the websites. Though difficult to measure the campaign’s overall effectiveness, the trolling was an attempt to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP. “The real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalise people into extremist beliefs,” Beirich said, adding that several US mass shooters had published manifestos to the site. India accounts for over 70 per cent of H-1B visa holders in the US. (With agency inputs) For all the latest news and india news, visit Times Now to get live updates and breaking news around the world.