Immigration scams charge for free government forms and processes, impersonate USCIS, or offer legal representation from people who are not permitted to give it. The central version is notario fraud: in much of Latin America a notario público is a qualified lawyer, and in the United States a notary public is not. USCIS will never ask you to transfer money to an individual.
An office on a commercial street, open in the evening, staffed by people who speak your language. A sign that says Notario Público.
In Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and much of Latin America, a notario público is a highly qualified lawyer holding a state appointment. In the United States, a notary public witnesses signatures, and the qualification takes an afternoon.
The words are the same. The professions are not comparable. And a person who has just arrived, needs legal help, and is looking for someone who can be trusted with the most important document in their life has no reason to know the difference exists.
USCIS puts it plainly: in the United States, notary publics are not attorneys and cannot represent you in legal matters, including immigration cases.
What follows is not primarily a fee scam, although fees are charged for forms that are free. It is a scheme in which a badly prepared or unauthorised filing can cost somebody their ability to remain in the country — and the Justice Department documents asylum applications filed without the applicant’s consent.
The whole scheme rests on it. No lie has to be told for the misunderstanding to take hold.
Evenings and weekends, no appointment, no unfamiliar procedure, staff who speak the language. For many people it is the only accessible option, and its accessibility is real.
Claimed connections, expedited processing, a special channel. USCIS lists “jumping the line” schemes among its common scams. There is no such channel.
Where it could have stopped
Only three kinds of person may represent you: a licensed attorney in good standing with a US state bar, a DOJ-accredited representative at a recognised organisation, and a supervised law student. All three are checkable on public lists, free, in less time than the appointment takes.
USCIS and EOIR forms are published at no cost. Payment is asked in cash, by app, or by transfer to an individual — and USCIS states it will never ask you to transfer money to an individual, and does not accept Western Union, MoneyGram, PayPal, Venmo or gift cards.
Sometimes blank. Sometimes in English the applicant cannot read. Sometimes containing statements about their circumstances that are not true.
EOIR documents a “10-year green card” scam in which asylum applications are filed without consent, misrepresenting eligibility — and fee waivers filed without consent, so the practitioner keeps the fee the client already paid.
The office keeps the originals and receives the correspondence. A hearing missed because nobody passed on the notice can produce a removal order in absentia.
No lie is required to start it. The word does the work. Everything after that is built on a translation error the victim brought with them and could not have known was one.
The accessible option and the safe option are different. An office that opens at seven, speaks your language and takes cash is genuinely easier to use than a law firm. The scheme wins on availability, not on persuasion.
The stakes remove the ability to shop around. Somebody with a filing deadline and a family is not going to spend three weeks comparing representatives.
Verification is unfamiliar. Checking a state bar register is obvious to people raised in the system and invisible to people who were not.
The harm is delayed and looks like bad luck. A denial arrives months later and reads like a government decision, not like the consequence of who filed it.
And complaining means contacting the government. For someone whose status is uncertain or was damaged by the fraud itself, that is not a neutral act — which is why only 1,291 reports reached the FTC in 2024, and why that number tells you almost nothing about scale.
Domestic, storefront, and embedded in the communities it takes from. This is not an offshore call centre; it is a business on a street, often with a real sign and a real lease.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review attributes the unauthorized practice of immigration law to notarios, immigration consultants and so-called “travel agents” — three storefront trades that put themselves next to a legal process without being part of it.
The remote versions travel further. USCIS’s catalogue also covers fake websites on non-.gov domains charging for free forms, impersonation calls, diversity visa lottery emails (the State Department does not send them, and the programme is free), fake job offers, fake universities, and Form I-9 emails aimed at employers.
New processes attract new scams immediately. USCIS has had to state specifically that it charges no fee for filing Form I-134A under Uniting for Ukraine, that the CHNV processes are free, and that TPS re-registration should not be paid for before the official notice is published. Every humanitarian programme creates a window in which the rules are not yet widely understood, and the fraud arrives inside it.
And measurement barely exists. Reports rose from 478 in 2022 to 1,291 in 2024 — a 170% rise on a base so small it could be one office’s client list, split across at least three federal complaint systems.
In much of Latin America a notario público is a qualified lawyer. In the United States a notary public is neither, and cannot represent anybody in an immigration case. That single mistranslation is the basis of an entire category of fraud, and both USCIS and the Justice Department maintain standing programmes about it.
USCIS maintains a standing catalogue of immigration scams — impersonators, fake websites, visa lottery fraud, job offers, "jumping the line" schemes — and pairs it with a short list of things the agency will never do. The most useful item is the payment rule: USCIS will never ask you to transfer money to an individual, and does not accept Western Union, MoneyGram, PayPal, Venmo or gift cards.
Reports to the FTC in its Immigration Services category rose from 478 in 2022 to 1,291 in 2024 — a 170% increase, and the sharpest proportional rise in any category we track. The absolute numbers are tiny, and that is the finding: this is the least-reported scheme on this site, for reasons that are structural rather than accidental.
Before you engage anybody. Check the three lists. A licensed attorney appears on their state bar’s public register. An accredited representative and a recognised organisation appear on the Justice Department’s EOIR list. Both are free and take minutes.
Then ask three questions and expect straight answers: Are you a licensed attorney or a DOJ-accredited representative? Which state bar, or which recognised organisation? May I have a copy of everything you file? A refusal on the third is as informative as a refusal on the first.
Never sign a blank form, or anything you have not had translated. Never hand over originals — give copies, and keep your passport, birth certificate and identity documents yourself. Make sure USCIS correspondence comes to your address.
If it has already happened.
On the fear of reporting. It is a real consideration and not one to wave away. Speaking to a licensed immigration attorney or a DOJ-recognised non-profit first — about your own position, before making any complaint — is the sequence that addresses it.
Into a cash business, which is the point of the storefront.
Fees are taken in cash, by payment app, or by transfer to an individual — the three methods USCIS says it never uses — and the office is a real business with a real lease. There is no mule account and no offshore transfer, because none is needed: the money is already domestic revenue in a trade that handles cash normally.
That is also why enforcement here is professional rather than financial. The remedies are state bar discipline, USCIS practitioner discipline, EOIR referrals and state consumer prosecutions, not forfeiture — and why the government’s own emphasis is on checking credentials beforehand rather than on recovering money afterwards.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains why the fee is asked for in cash — and why a legitimate-looking storefront is the least traceable place for money to arrive.
No agency publishes a line item for most of the schemes on this site, so these charts show the official categories that contain this scheme. Each series is labelled with the agency's own category name. See how the mapping works.
Three categories only: a licensed attorney in good standing with a US state bar, an accredited representative recognised by the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review working for a recognised organisation, and a law student or graduate supervised by one of those. Everybody else — consultant, agency, travel agent, notary — is not permitted to give immigration legal advice.
No, and this is the whole scheme. In much of Latin America a notario público is a highly qualified lawyer with a state appointment. In the United States a notary public witnesses signatures and the qualification takes an afternoon. USCIS states plainly that US notary publics are not attorneys and cannot represent you.
There is no such channel. USCIS lists "jumping the line" schemes among its common scams, and no fee to any private person changes a processing queue. A claim of government connections is a claim that the person is either lying or describing a bribe.
US government sites end in .gov. USCIS forms are free to download from uscis.gov, and any site charging for them is not the agency. USCIS also says it will only contact you through official government channels and will not contact you through your personal social media accounts.
That fear is exactly what makes this scheme work, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a brush-off. Complaints can be made to the state bar, to the USCIS Disciplinary Counsel, and to the Justice Department's EOIR fraud programme at [email protected] — and a licensed immigration attorney or a DOJ-recognised non-profit can advise on your own position first.
An application prepared badly can be denied; one containing false statements can be treated as fraud; and EOIR documents asylum applications filed without the applicant's consent. A hearing missed because nobody told you about it can produce a removal order in absentia. None of that is fixed by recovering the money.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.