Posted on 10/06/2022 7:46:27 PM PDT by 11th_VA
Brian Chen ran companies that offered "guaranteed" admission to U.S. colleges that would grant wealthy students a visa.
LOS ANGELES (CN) — The mastermind of a scheme that faked admission tests, transcripts and essays for wealthy Chinese students to get admitted to U.S. colleges and obtain student visas was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
Yi "Brian" Chen, 35, was also ordered to pay $400,000 in fines and $50,000 in restitution at his sentencing hearing Monday in Los Angeles.
U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi agreed with the government that Chen was the leader of the enterprise, but he rejected the government's request to base his sentence on conduct that either wasn't charged or for which Chen was acquitted at a bench trial.
Authorities arrested Chen and a co-defendant in 2021 and accused them of running two companies in Alhambra and Arcadia, California, that charged foreign students thousands of dollars for “guaranteed” admission to a college that would lead to the issuance of an F-1 student visa. Chen was convicted of visa fraud and identify theft this past March. His co-defendant pleaded guilty and testified at Chen's trial.
"Under the guise of operating an educational consulting company, defendant Chen made millions of dollars by faking every aspect of the college admission process," prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney's Office in LA said in their sentencing memorandum. "In doing so, Chen sat at the very top of a wide network of fraudsters, including imposter test-takers, essay ghostwriters, and fake transcript purveyors."
According to the government, Chen made $10 million from wealthy foreign students through two sham educational companies he ran. He secured his clients admission to U.S. colleges, which is a prerequisite to get a student visa, by paying for imposters take the required Test of English as a Foreign Language or the SAT. He also obtained doctored school or college transcripts for the applicants and hired ghostwriters to write admission essays for them.
He obtained at least 25 fraudulent student visas for his clients, and got them accepted to the likes of Columbia University, New York University, the University of Southern California and Boston University.
Chen also engaged a Hollywood screenplay writer to provide fake admission essays and letters of recommendation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julia Hu said at the hearing.
The government had asked for a 70-month sentence. Chen's attorney pleaded for just two years and one day...
And Bidumb traffics aliens across the border and nobody is even fined a cent or spends a minute in jail. Ubama gave us Daca, which isn’t much different from what those Chinese guys did.
So less than 5% in fines, four years of soft-prison, out in two with Good Behavior?
Wow, that is SO harsh! /s
Seems like a growth industry in the making as even if caught the wrist slap hardly stings.
And what of the Chinese customers?
Any of them deported, degrees rescinded?
Yah, I thought not.
MAINLAND Chinese students and mainland immigrants in general are a fifth column. Why we let even one fly into our country is beyond me. Time to bring back the laws we had on Chinese immigration that we used to have.
Agreed.IMO every Chinese citizen is a spy of some sort.some are industrial spies and some are military. Some are willing spies (”we serve Chairman Mao,the Great Helmsman”) and some are unwilling (”we know where your parents live,Comrade”).
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