The Special Immigrant Visa (SIC) program was created in 2009 to help Afghans who served as interpreters for the U.S. military escape Taliban threats. It’s the least we can do since merely talking to an American would put their life at risk. Needless to say, those visas were in demand, and recommendations were necessary to obtain them. Navy reserve officer Jeromy Pittmann signed over twenty letters in which he claimed that he personally knew and had supervised the Afghan national visa applicants while they worked as translators in support of the U.S. military and NATO. He stated that applicants’ lives were in jeopardy because the Taliban considered them to be traitors. Quite a recommendation, especially since Pittmann had never met them. Fraudsters are after all very good with words.
Pittmann worked with an unnamed co-conspirator in Kabul who solicited Pittmann’s assistance back in February of 2018. From May of 2018 to September of 2022, Pittmann wrote recommendation letters for applicants claiming personal knowledge of the applicants. The personal knowledge being that Pittmann knew the applicant was paying him several thousand dollars for his words. Words stated by Pittmann that he believed the applicants did not pose any threat to the national security of the United States. But who really knows? And where are these supposed translators now?
To avoid detection, the money was wired to Pittmann under the label “family support.” Correspondence confirming receipt of payments portrayed a fraudster who had hope in the scheme. “I got it today. Thank you and thank your friend for sending it,” Pittmann said in an email after receiving a payment in 2018. “I just wish the money would keep coming. Ha. Maybe one day we will get a business started.” Luckily, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service stopped that. Pittmann was arrested and convicted on July 16, 2024 of fraud.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “Navy Reserve officer convicted in Afghan visa bribery scheme” published by Stars And Stripes on July 16, 2024.
Cmdr. Jeromy Pittmann, seen here as a lieutenant commander in Afghanistan in 2014, was found guilty July 12, 2024, of accepting bribes and writing false recommendation letters for applicants to a U.S. visa program for Afghans.
A Navy Reserve commander faces up to 45 years in prison after a federal jury convicted him of bribery and other charges related to fake recommendation letters he wrote for Afghans seeking visas to live in the United States.
