Man gets 2 years for 392 false U.S. visa petitions for PH workers

Bogdan Dragos, sentenced to two years in U.S. federal prison for faking visa petitions for workers from the Philippines. ORANGE COUNTY, FLORIDA POLICE PHOTO

ORLANDO, Florida – A U.S. district court judge on September 2 sentenced Bogdan Dragos, 34, a Romanian national to two years in federal prison for filing a false petition to obtain visas for workers from the Philippines. Dragos pleaded guilty last June 12.

According to court documents, in 2010, while operating an employment agency in Daytona Beach, Dragos filed a petition with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to obtain 392 visas for unnamed workers from the Philippines.

In that petition, he falsely claimed that he had contracts with 12 hotels in the Daytona Beach area to provide foreign workers on a temporary basis.

USCIS approved the petition, and a large number of Filipino workers started applying for visas at the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

The fraud was detected when an employee from the U.S. Embassy began calling the hotels in Daytona Beach and learned that the purported contracts did not exist.

This case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. It was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Bruce S. Ambrose. U.S. District Judge Paul G. Byron handed the sentence.

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