A group of criminals set up a fake U.S. “immigration court” inside a Venezuelan prison to scam migrants in New York out of thousands of dollars through false court proceedings and “legal” fees, Univisión reported Monday.
A man who identified himself as Gustavo Cortez Osco reportedly ran the scam. He personally claimed to the news channel that he is a member of the Tren de Aragua transnational criminal organization that has now spread to the United States.
Univisión, describing the scam as an “unprecedented scheme in the history of U.S. immigration fraud,” stated that it discovered in an investigation that the scammers pretended to be U.S. lawyers and judges for a fictional immigration court that operated from Tocuyito, a once-overcrowded maximum security prison in Venezuela that the socialist Maduro regime “raided” in October and which now houses one of the two “reeducation camps” for dissidents of dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The scammers allegedly presented their victims with false documents featuring the logos of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). Some of the false documents, Univisión explained, featured poor translations from Spanish to English and used legal terminology common in Latin America, but not the United States.
The victims were “ordered” to make payments ranging from $300 to $1,000 before proceeding with the false “immigration court hearing.” Rumors of a lawyer “who offered solutions to all kinds of immigration problems,” Univisión said, spread this year among immigrant parishioners of evangelical churches in New York.
According to Univisión, the fake immigration lawyer offered “quicker and cheaper solutions” to asylum, residence, work permits, and other migrant-related legal issues in New York.
Cortez Osco, pretending to be an immigration attorney, reportedly utilized a “western New York” phone number and claimed that he worked in an office building in New Jersey to fool several Hispanic migrant women in the United States. The women reportedly “liked” that Cortez Osco spoke “Spanish with an English accent” and that he was “interested in the hardships they went through” to arrive in the United States.
Univisión explained that one of its reporters verified that the purported office does not exist. Two people who work on the floor where the law firm supposedly operated said they had never heard of it.
Univisión explained that the scammers did not collect the money directly from the victims but used intermediaries with U.S. bank accounts running the Zelle payment system. The victims claimed they were strictly warned not to mention the reason for the payment in the transaction’s description.
The television network stated that it began contacting the recipients of the transactions using payment receipts provided by the scammed victims, but only managed to reach two of the individuals, who “nervously denied” having borrowed their accounts for the transactions. One of the individuals, Univisión explained, identified himself as a Colombian national who worked parking cars in New York. The man said that he would report the situation to the authorities.
Unvisión stated that Cortez Osco himself called the director of Univisión’s investigative team hours after they had finished reaching out to the individuals that received the scammed money. Cortez Osco reportedly used the same number he employed to deceive the victims and “coldly admitted that the whole thing was a scam.”
“I was in this extortion thing for many years,” Cortez Osco reportedly said in the same English accent used for his fake lawyer fraud persona.
The man, who refused to give out his real name and nationality, explained that he set up the fake immigration court using a green screen and boasted of his alleged affiliation with the Tren de Aragua. Cortez Osco asserted that he does not mind confessing to his migrant scam because the crime “would not have a major impact on the sentences he faces” – using the Spanish-language idiom “what’s one more stripe to a tiger?” – and assured that he had never set foot on U.S. soil.
Univisión reported that Cortez Osco “only seemed interested in one issue. He wanted to know if Univisión would mention in its report the names of the intermediaries who lent themselves to capture the payments from the victims.”
When asked why he was interested in that particular matter and not in the broader scam itself, he responded that it was a “sentimental issue.”
“[Among] all these people there is a girl that I may like and that is why I am afraid that they may get to her,” Cortez Osco told Univisión. “She likewise does not know me, I am only in love with her. In spite of everything, one here locked up in these four walls, one thinks about feelings.”
One of the scam’s victims identified herself as Rusbelys Robles, a Venezuelan nurse presently in New York. Robles explained that she was awaiting approval of her asylum status when Cortez Osco offered to process her U.S. residency status — a procedural leap that is not legally possible, according to experts. Robles claimed that she paid the scammers $3,365.
“He [Cortez Osco] would tell me that he was more than my lawyer, my friend, to trust him. And really, for a moment, I trusted him. It was so much so that I told him that if he was from here [the United States] he can help me, I’m looking for a job,” Robles said.
Univisión also reached out to Nivida Yolanda Green, a 36-year-old Honduran migrant who claimed to have been a victim of the fraud. Green recounted that a woman who identified herself as “Alice Thompson,” a purported immigration judge, was present at her fake immigration court hearing.
“He [Cortez Osco] told me that he is a college educated attorney and that he is willing to help me get my benefit here,” Green said. “He spoke very appealingly.”
Green, who stated that she paid $1,115 to the scammers, recalled to Univisión that Cortez Osco pressured her with the “fee” payments, arguing that if the paperwork was not filed on time, “Donald Trump would win the presidency and order mass deportations.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
