A person lacking legal status is vulnerable to a wide range of abusive behavior, including fraud. Imagine making the discovery that a person, whom you’d believed to be a police officer offering assistance with your green card, is actually a con artist? A press release by the King’s County District Attorney’s office details a Brooklyn-based crime ring that coerced immigrants into forking over more than $8,000, by misrepresenting themselves and offering fraudulent assistance with government documents related to the immigrants’ legal status. (Maybe no one told them that the Big Apple could have some big worms.)
Throughout the summer of 2015, the three defendants worked as a group to defraud some of Brooklyn’s most vulnerable—and hidden—residents. According to authorities, a scammer impersonating a Sergeant with the New York Police Department would establish repertoire with immigrants, by pretending to solicit donations to the Police Department. (That takes some moxie.) Together with a cohort, he would then coerce them into giving him cash to help with documentation surrounding their legal status. Court documents detail how one of the scammers went as far as to threaten one immigrant with deportation if she did not hand over $6,000 that they had falsely claimed was necessary to address an issue with her husband’s documents. (No wonder a couple of the defendants later skipped town—who would want to get busted by a New York City police officer for impersonating a New York City police officer?)
As New York City is one of the world’s most diverse cities, the District Attorney’s office runs an Immigration Fraud Unit, which brought this case before a judge after an investigation by the City Police Department. All three defendants pleaded guilty to related charges after two of them were extradited from Pennsylvania: one defendant was sentenced to one to three years in prison for third-degree grand larceny; another was sentenced to conditional discharge for first-degree attempted criminal impersonation; the third was also sentenced to conditional discharge for charges of second-degree criminal impersonation. (Now make sure the phony police uniform stays in the evidence locker.)
Immigrants who have been criminally victimized don’t always see or understand the avenue for legal recourse, and thus are far less likely to report a crime. This creates opportunities for “real” citizens to exploit immigrants’ hopes, dreams and fears. Congratulations to authorities for bringing such scammers to justice.
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