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A female Russian national used Craigslist to arrange a sham
"green card marriage" with a Disneyland worker whose illegal dowry consisted
entirely of a leased 2006 Ford Mustang, investigators charge. Federal agents
today arrested Yuliya Kalinina, 25, for allegedly hatching the scheme, which
she began advertising in late-2005 on the Internet's leading classifed ads
site. According to a criminal complaint unsealed today in U.S. District
Court in Los Angeles, Kalinina's various Craigslist posts sought a "business
marriage" or "Green Card Marriage" in return for a total of $15,000. The
proposed union, Kalinina noted, was a "strictly platonic business offer, sex
not involved." According to prosecutors, Benjamin Adams, then a Disneyland
employee, answered Kalinina's ad and subsequently married her in early-2006.
According to the complaint, Adams, 30, told Kalinina that he had bad credit
and needed a new car. She agreed to Adams's suggestion that she "lease him a
new automobile as payment for entering the marriage fraud scheme." Ten weeks
after the couple's nuptials, Adams and Kalinina filed immigrations forms
seeking citizenship papers for the new bride (in an interview with federal
agents, Kalinina said she hatched the marriage plot as a back-up plan in the
event a pending asylum application was denied). Kalinina and Adams were wed
by Kalinina's boyfriend, who told probers he became a minister "simply by
registering on an Internet site for ministers." If convicted of the felony
marriage fraud rap, Kalinina and Adams--who will celebrate their second
anniversary in February--each face a maximum of five years in prison. In a
statement, an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement official said the case
was the first one ICE has uncovered "where the alleged perpetrators used the
Internet to orchestrate the scheme."
Source: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/1129073marriage1
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