Ten Indian nationals were indicted recently by a federal grand jury in Botson on charges related to conspiring to stage phony armed robberies of convenience stores for the sole purpose of allowing store clerks to falsely claim on immigration applications that they were victims of an armed robbery.
The U non-immigrant visa program (U-visa) is a program created by Congress in 2000 through the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act to protect non-citizen victims of serious crimes. A visa granted under this program allows the victim to remain legally in the United States. To qualify for the program, an applicant must have been a victim of a serious crime while in the United States and must have suffered some actual harm which can be either physical or psychological.
Applications for U-visas also require certification from a law enforcement agency that a crime had occurred in which the applicant was a victim and that the victim has been helpful in the investigation of the crime. Once the application is approved the applicant is granted temporary legal status for four years. After three years they are eligible to apply for a green card.
According to the grand jury charging documents Rambhai Patel and his co-conspirators staged phony armed robberies at at least six convenience stores, liquor stores and fast food restaurants in order to allow the clerks at these stores to claim that they were victims of a violent armed robbery on an application for a U-visa.
During the course of the phony robberies, the make-believe robbers would appear to threaten the store clerks with a gun before taking cash from the cash register and fleeing the scene of the crime with all of this being captured on store surveillance video. In each instance victims of the crime waited five or more minutes after the “robber” had left before reporting the crime to police. Waiting five or more minutes to report the crime rather than calling the police immediately gave the “robber” sufficient time to make a successful getaway. This seemingly small detail was a red flag that aroused suspicion by law enforcement and ultimately led to the arrests of the ten charged conspirators.
The real crime was perpetrated by the “victims” of the phony robberie falsely applying for U-visa status, the store owners who were paid for the use of their stores and Patel and his co-conspirators who were paid to set up the entire scenario.
Armed robbery is often used as the basis for phony U-visa application scams for many reasons. It qualifies as a serious crime and psychological harm such as anxiety or PTSD following the phony crime is easy to fake to show mental harm without a physical injury. In addition, to qualify for the U-visa program, the victim must cooperate with law enforcement which is easy to achieve merely by reporting the crime.
While initially, each robbery may have appeared legitimate, after reviewing the video evidence that Patel thought would indicate that a robbery had occurred, Massachusetts law enforcement began to notice a pattern involved with the rash of robberies including clerks who appeared surprisingly calm throughout the robberies during what should have been a stressful situation and firearms that appeared to be fake. The videos from several different robberies also appeared to show the same person committing multiple robberies. Most tellingly was the five-minute wait time before reporting the crime in all of the robberies which would have been inconsistent with a legitimate robbery and even more significant when this occurred in multiple robberies involving the same robber.
Eventually, police were able to identify Balwinder Singh, as the phony robber and he, in turn, cooperated with law enforcement, leading them to Rambhai Patel the mastermind of the operation. In 2025, both Singh and Patel pleaded guilty to charges related to the phony robberies and visa fraud. The ten charged in the April indictments are alleged to have set up the robberies or paid for themselves or family members to be victims of the robberies.
And if the case is not bizarre enough for you, similar charges were brought in 2025 against Chandrakant Patel, a Louisiana business owner who himself is a U visa recipient. Patel is accused of conspiring with the chiefs of police of four Louisiana cities to perpetrate the same phony armed robbery U-visa scam, but with one major twist. They are accused of not even staging phony robberies, but merely writing up police reports for non-existent robberies. Their cases are awaiting trial.