Identity and Benefits Fraud Branch

Office of Investigations: Smuggling/Public Safety Division

The nation's right to determine who may cross its borders, and preserve the integrity of that process is at the heart of fraud investigations. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) controls the admissibility of aliens into the United States. However, the use of fraud is pervasive, as the unabated desire of foreign nationals to emigrate to the United States by any means possible continues to generate many thousands of incidences of fraud each year to circumvent the legal process.

Investigative emphasis is placed on identifying and prosecuting cases involving the manufacture, distribution and use of counterfeit or altered immigration and identity documents to various misrepresentation schemes, including identity, relationships or other material facts.

Immigration fraud takes many forms, but generally falls into two broad categories: document fraud and benefit application fraud.

Document fraud encompasses the counterfeiting, sale, and/or use of identity documents or breeder documents such as birth certificates and social security cards, alien registration documents and stamps, passports and visas, and other documents and paperwork used to circumvent the immigration laws. Essentially, document fraud seeks to avoid detection.

Benefit application fraud involves the willful misrepresentation of a material fact to gain an immigration benefit in the absence of lawful entitlement. In point of fact, document fraud and benefit application fraud are often part of a continuum. Simply put, one tends to beget the other. Essentially, document fraud utilizes fraudulent documents to avoid detection to gain entry to the United States whereas benefit application fraud seeks to obtain some type of legal status, an immigration benefit. In other words, document fraud seeks to avoid detection while benefit fraud seeks legal acceptance. That legal acceptance or legal status is likely to be achieved using fraudulent documents.

Although many individual aliens seek to avoid detection through fraudulent documents, other aliens are involved in criminal activities of much greater magnitude. These aliens are frequently members of criminal groups/organizations that try to manipulate the system to perpetrate criminal schemes. Increasingly, fraudulent documents and fraudulently obtained immigration status are used by criminal aliens to facilitate illegal activities such as drug trafficking, violent crime, evasion of employer sanctions, and the perpetration of entitlement fraud.