A New York City man posing as a law enforcement agent promised a woman that he could help her get a green card if she invested $500,000 with him, prosecutors said on Friday. Instead, the man kept the money and never submitted a visa application as he had promised.
According to a federal indictment unsealed on Friday, he lied to the woman, a Chinese citizen whom the indictment names only as Jane Doe, giving her various excuses for years for why the process had been delayed.
The man, Tommy Aijie Da Silva Weng, 49, was arrested on Friday and has been charged with wire fraud, mail fraud and impersonating a federal agent. He will be detained until a bail hearing on Monday, officials said.
Prosecutors had requested he be held in detention given his extensive ties and travel to China. His lawyer, Jullian Harris-Calvin, declined to comment.
John J. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement on Friday that “the defendant preyed on the victim’s desire to become a United States citizen and pursue the American dream, then stole not only that dream, but also hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
According to the indictment, the scheme began when Mr. Weng met the victim in China in 2016 and told her he was a federal law enforcement officer who was seeking investors for a project building hotels in California on behalf of the U.S. government. At a later meeting, he showed her a business card from the “Federal Officers Police Association” that had his name on it.
Mr. Weng told the woman that if she invested at least $500,000, she could be eligible to apply for a green card under the EB-5 program and that he would use his “connections” to expedite the process.
The EB-5 program, otherwise known as the immigrant investor program, allows foreigners to become permanent American residents if they invest a substantial amount of money into a commercial enterprise that creates jobs.
The woman signed a contract with Mr. Weng that day and wrote out a check for $501,500 to his company, Ding Cheng Overseas Management Inc., the following month, court documents showed. That amount included $1,500 that he said she owed him in filing fees, according to the indictment.
Mr. Weng later gave the woman a receipt with a number to track her supposed application on the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, prosecutors said.
After some time, the woman began to complain that her application — which did not show a name attached to it on the website — had not progressed in the system, to which Mr. Weng responded with excuses about “administrative delays,” the indictment said.
Then in 2018, Mr. Weng supplied her a new number, which, when she entered it into the website, showed that an application had been approved. The U.S.C.I.S. database, prosecutors said, has no record of any EB-5 paperwork ever being filed on the woman’s behalf.
For years after, Mr. Weng repeatedly told the woman that her application was being worked on and that it was “part of a government-backed program and everything had to be done secretively,” according to the indictment.
To keep up appearances, Mr. Weng habitually asked the woman for personal records, made up a lawsuit to excuse the delays and sent her fake photos of deposits. He also claimed he was an agent with the Department of Homeland Security who was being transferred to a new position with Interpol in Italy, according to court documents.
Prosecutors said that when the woman threatened to withdraw her application and request a refund, Mr. Weng returned about $75,000 to her.
A detention memo for Mr. Weng noted that he drove a red Hummer with a vanity license plate that read: BWTICE. The memo added that the first three letters were believed to reference a Buddhist temple he was associated with in Flushing, Queens, while the final three letters stood for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Mr. Weng was previously arrested in 2015 for impersonating an F.B.I. agent in a scheme to recruit young men into believing they were acting as confidential informants and going undercover for him, according to the indictment. He displayed fake badges, an F.B.I. jacket, a New York Police Department vest and an ICE hat, among other items.
He pleaded guilty to illegally using official badges in 2016, shortly before meeting the woman in China, and was sentenced to time served.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.