Federal authorities in Boston announced Wednesday that they had dismantled a marriage fraud ring responsible for arranging hundreds of sham marriages across Massachusetts, a scheme prosecutors say generated more than $6 million in profit over more than a decade. U.S. Attorney Leah Foley revealed the takedown during an 11 a.m. press conference at the Moakley Courthouse, though as of Wednesday afternoon no further details about the people charged or the mechanics of the operation had been released.
According to NBC Boston, Foley said the ring arranged the marriages specifically to obtain unlawful immigration benefits, and that the operation spanned more than ten years before investigators caught up with it. The announcement came with few specifics beyond the dollar figure and the duration of the scheme, leaving open questions about who was charged and how the network operated. Foley has served as the top federal prosecutor for the District of Massachusetts since January 2025, bringing more than two decades of experience that includes supervising international money laundering and human trafficking cases as Deputy Chief of the Narcotics & Money Laundering Unit, according to Federal Lawyer.
A Pattern of Multi-State Operations
Wednesday's announcement comes amid other federal marriage-fraud cases. Such schemes have involved staged wedding photos, joint financial accounts and fraudulent immigration petitions. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio has also brought a marriage-fraud case.
That Ohio case landed just days before the Boston announcement. On October 16, a federal grand jury indicted 31-year-old Jingming Chen of Quincy on a charge of conspiracy to commit marriage fraud, alleging he was paid by a foreign national to enter a fake marriage and fabricate online romance backstories and joint bank accounts for immigration submissions. The indictment illustrates the cross-state cooperation now underway among federal prosecutors, Homeland Security Investigations, and USCIS offices tied to Boston.
Bigger Rings, Bigger Numbers
The scale described by Foley echoes a much larger case unsealed in New York two months earlier. In August, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged 11 people in a decade-long nationwide scheme that arranged more than 1,000 sham marriages across multiple states, including Massachusetts, generating tens of millions of dollars by charging foreign nationals up to $100,000 per green card, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. In that scheme, participating U.S. citizens were allegedly paid up to $30,000 to marry foreign nationals primarily from China.
Boston federal court has seen this kind of case before. In a case involving a California-based marriage fraud agency, ringleader Marcialito Biol Benitez pleaded guilty, with sentencing scheduled for January 10, 2024. The ring helped more than 600 non-citizens obtain green cards through over 400 dishonest unions, charging clients between $20,000 and $35,000 and staging fake ceremonies at chapels and parks, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts reported.
The enforcement push extends beyond marriage cases alone. In June, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts charged 15 people in a $1.4 million public assistance enforcement action involving visa fraud, identity theft, MassHealth, SNAP benefits, and Social Security disability payments, according to the Washington Examiner.
Steep Criminal Penalties
Anyone convicted of knowingly entering a sham marriage to evade immigration law faces up to five years in federal prison and fines as high as $250,000, according to the Department of Justice.
Further details on the ring Foley announced Wednesday — including names of those charged — had not been released as of publication.
