A criminal ring is setting up fake U.S. “immigration courts” inside Venezuelan prisons to scam New York migrants out of thousands of dollars in bogus court proceedings and “legal” fees, Univision reports. Reported Monday.
The scam was reportedly perpetrated by a man calling himself Gustavo Cortés Osco, who told news channels he was a member of the Tren de Aragua international crime ring, which now has operations in the United States.
Univision described the scam as “an unprecedented scheme in the history of U.S. immigration fraud” and said its investigation found that the scammers posed as U.S. lawyers and judges from a fictitious immigration court operating out of Venezuela's once-overcrowded maximum security prison, Tocuito, which the socialist Maduro regime “has been trying to impose on U.S. citizens.”AttackedIt opened in October and currently has two “Re-education campsFor opponents of dictator Nicolas Maduro.”
The scammers allegedly presented victims with fake documents featuring logos from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). Some of the fake documents had poor translations from Spanish to English or used legal terminology that's common in Latin America but not in the United States, Univision explained.
Victims were “ordered” to pay between $300 and $1,000 before going ahead in a bogus “immigration trial.” According to Univision, rumors of a lawyer “offering solutions to all kinds of immigration problems” spread among immigrant congregants at an evangelical church in New York this year.
According to Univision, the fake immigration lawyers were offering “quicker, cheaper solutions” to asylum, residency, work permits and other immigration-related legal issues in New York.
Cortez-Osco reportedly posed as an immigration lawyer, used a “western New York” phone number and claimed to work from an office building in New Jersey to deceive several Hispanic immigrant women living in the United States. The women reportedly “liked” Cortez-Osco because he spoke “Spanish with an English accent” and was “interested in the hardships they had gone through” to get to the United States.
Univision said one of its reporters confirmed that the firm did not exist, and two people who work on the floor where the law firm supposedly operates said they had never heard of it.
Univision said the scammers did not collect money directly from victims, but instead used intermediaries with U.S. bank accounts that use the ZELL payment system. Victims claim they were strictly warned not to include reasons for payment in their transaction descriptions.
The network began contacting recipients of the transactions using payment receipts provided by victims of the scam, but was only able to reach two people, who “anxiously denied” borrowing their accounts to make the transactions. One identified himself as a Colombian national who runs a parking lot business in New York, according to Univision, and said he would report the situation to authorities.
Univision said that hours after finishing contacting the individuals who received the scam money, Cortez-Osco himself called the head of Univision's investigative team, reportedly using the same number he used to scam his victims, and “calmly admitted that the whole thing was a scam.”
“I have been involved in extortion for many years,” Cortez-Osco reportedly said in the same English accent he used in his role as a fake lawyer conman.
The man, who declined to give his real name or nationality, explained that he had created a fake immigration court using a green screen and boasted about his ties to Tren de Aragua. Cortes-Osco claimed he was willing to confess to immigration fraud because the crime “will not have a significant impact on the sentence he receives.” Citing the Spanish idiom “One more stripe counts for a tiger,” he asserted that he had never set foot on U.S. soil.
Univision reported that Cortez-Osco “appeared to be interested in just one issue: He wanted to know whether Univision would name in its report the intermediaries who helped extract money from victims.”
When asked why he was interested in this particular issue and not the fraud itself, he said it was an “emotional issue.”
“[Among] “Among all these people, there's this girl that I like, and I'm scared for people to go near her,” Cortez-Osco told Univision. “She doesn't know me, and I'm just in love with her. No matter what, when you're trapped inside these four walls, you think about emotions.”
One of the scam victims identified herself as Lasveris Robles, a Venezuelan nurse currently in New York. Robles explained that she was waiting for her asylum status to be approved when Cortez Osco offered to process her U.S. residency, a procedural leap that experts say is legally impossible. Robles claimed to have paid $3,365 to the scammers.
“he [Cortez Osco] He told me he was more than just my lawyer and friend, he told me he was someone I could trust, and I really did, for a moment, trust him. So much so that I thought, if he's from here, [the United States] “He's helping me out. I'm looking for work,” Robles said.
Univision also contacted Nivida Yolanda Green, a 36-year-old Honduran immigrant who claims to have been the victim of a scam. Green said she was accompanied at her fake immigration court hearing by a woman who called herself “Alice Thompson” and claimed to be an immigration judge.
“he [Cortez Osco] “He told me he was a college-educated lawyer and he was willing to help me get my benefits here,” Green said. “The way he spoke was very engaging.”
Green, who said she paid the scammers $1,115, recounted to Univision that Cortez-Osco pressured her for a “fee” and claimed that “Donald Trump would win the election and order mass deportations” if the documents were not submitted in a timely manner.
Christian K. Caruso is a Venezuelan author documenting life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter. here.
