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In March, a man who needed legal representation reached out to Maria Aguila’s law office in Jacksonville, Florida, asking to meet with an attorney. The only problem was that she had never heard of this attorney, and she is a solo practitioner who focuses on immigration and family law. Aguila was in court at the time, but the man left his alleged attorney’s website and phone number. When Aguila called, someone answered and hung up. And the website, she soon discovered, listed her law firm’s name and address. It even included her employer identification number. She warned her clients in a Facebook post in English and Spanish: “Someone is IMPERSONATING MY LAW FIRM,” Aguila wrote. “PLEASE DO NOT CALL THIS BUSINESS AND PAY ANY MONEY.”
In her 26 years of practicing law, Aguila had never found herself in such a circumstance. “You put your blood, sweat, and tears into your business to help clients because it means something to you—I’m the daughter of immigrants,” Aguila, whose parents are from the Philippines, told me. “Here’s someone just taking your identity and your information and robbing people.” She filed a complaint with the Florida Bar. The scammer’s website is still online as of the publication of this story.
In the last year, the country’s most prominent legal organizations—such as the American Bar Association and the American Immigration Lawyers Association— have warned that scams targeting immigrants and attorneys have increased to an alarming level. Certainly, these kinds of grifts are not new in the legal world, which for years has dealt with bad actors practicing law without a license. But representatives from several legal groups and private attorneys told me that today’s scams are more sophisticated and harder to detect thanks to the proliferation of AI and social media. “Criminals have identified this as an opportunity,” said Charity Anastasio, Practice and Ethics Counsel at AILA.
Scammers have also taken advantage of the desperate positions many immigrants find themselves in today as the Trump administration ramps up detention and deportation efforts. This population is much less likely to feel comfortable reporting a crime when ICE and law enforcement are working together more than ever. “This fear and desperation make it very ripe for individuals to be taken advantage of in this way,” said Adonia Simpson, the policy and pro bono deputy director at the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration, which has documented more than a dozen reports of fraud since last summer. But given most victims’ reluctance to contact law enforcement, the true scope of these scams is unknown. “The damage that this could be causing in the long run could be very significant,” Simpson added. “We really have no idea how pervasive this is. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
“The damage that this could be causing in the long run could be very significant. We really have no idea how pervasive this is. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
Scammers’ tactics vary widely but appear to have a number of strategies in common. They advertise themselves on Facebook as law firms and communicate with victims through WhatsApp. Often, they adopt the name of a reputable law office, such as Aguila’s firm, or even individual attorneys. The American Bar Association, for example, recently discovered that several fraudsters had created documents using the organization’s old logo after they received calls from victims looking to speak with attorneys who claimed to work at the organization. Other scammers have posed as staff for the nonprofit Catholic Charities USA, which became so concerned about the pervasiveness of the problem that the organization issued an alert on its website to prospective clients.
The scams also usually involve the creation of a website with photos of supposed attorneys and smiling clients posing with documents like Social Security cards—but as several lawyers I spoke to pointed out, many of them appear to be created with AI. Victims are told to submit payment for legal services via Zelle and other cash transfer apps. Once the payment is received, the phony lawyers stop responding to their victims, several attorneys told me. “You see people spending thousands and thousands of dollars for services that are not rendered,” Simpson said.
Other schemes are more elaborate. In one New York case, scammers used Facebook to contact victims, fabricated documents using symbols from the federal government, and even organized sham court hearings via videoconference with fraudsters impersonating judges. Screenshots of one such hearing show a man dressed in a suit sitting behind a laptop, an American flag to his right, and a seal that reads, “United States Court of Appeals” behind him. Another image shows another person wearing a US Customs and Border Protection jacket, with the emblem of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services behind him. At least 150 people needing legal help between March 2023 and November 2025 paid more than $100,000 to the phony lawyers. Victims’ funds were laundered into bank accounts overseas, though defendants kept some of the cash for personal expenses like DoorDash food orders, court records state.
In February, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted five people from Colombia accused of running the operation. A trial date has not been set; they each face up to 20 years in prison. “The criminal conduct charged in the indictment is no ordinary fraud,” attorneys wrote in court filings. “The defendants undermined the rule of law and the integrity of our immigration system.”
But the New York case is a rare example of an immigration scam that resulted in arrests. Most seemingly operate without consequences, in part because the Internet offers anonymity to criminals who could be based anywhere. In Aguila’s case, an IT specialist found that the website using her office’s address was registered in Turkey, she told me.
Law enforcement agencies, from state to federal, are also siloed from one another, which makes it difficult to crack down on larger scam operations. A recent case in Kenner, Louisiana, illustrates how complicated investigating these cases can be. Police there arrested a 25-year-old man in February on charges that he impersonated a lawyer and scammed a Honduran woman seeking to secure legal status for her two children. Police say the man, David Ardila-Garcia, promoted a fake law firm on Facebook with the name “Immigration Attorney Services.” For 11 months, he met with the Louisiana mother on FaceTime and asked her to send him several payments totaling more than $6,000. When her case wasn’t moving forward, she contacted Kenner police and provided detectives with the phone number tied to the Zelle account where she sent payments. A query of a law enforcement database revealed the number belonged to Ardila-Garcia, who lived in Fort Myers, Florida. He was arrested on a warrant there and extradited to Louisiana.
Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley told me he believes there are more victims. Banking records obtained by detectives show that Ardila-Garcia deposited about $250,000 into a Colombian bank. But Conley said his agency struggled to persuade federal and Florida authorities to help them secure a search warrant for Ardila-Garcia’s laptop. “That would have been a treasure trove of information as far as other victims,” Conley said.
The impacts on victims are endless. Beyond losing thousands of dollars that could have gone toward legitimate legal assistance, immigrants could also be missing court deadlines and hearings in their cases at a time when the system is increasingly hostile to them. “You could be simply deported in an environment like this,” Anastasio, from AILA, said. “You don’t have any money left over to pay anybody because you just gave it to a criminal.” In the New York federal case, one victim was ordered deported by a judge, though the ruling was later reversed after the scam came to light.
In the end, these scams also create enormous challenges for immigration attorneys. Many who spoke to Anastasio at AILA describe feeling shame that their identity was used to harm people, she told me. Anastasio advises them to file complaints with the police and their respective bar associations in case they’re ever accused of wrongdoing. “It hurts the rule of law. It hurts our standing as a system of justice,” she told me. “That’s under enough attack now already. We really don’t need this added criminal element.”
Last week, someone seeking legal help called Aguila’s office in Jacksonville. A TikTok video advertising immigration services in Spanish had surfaced, this one listing her phone number. Aguila couldn’t believe her identity had wound up as part of another scam. “I’m trying to get my work done for my clients, and then I’m constantly having to be worried about people calling me, thinking I’m offering this assistance when I’m not,” she told me over the phone on Tuesday. “I don’t even know what to do anymore. It seems out of control.”
