America has long been known as “The Land of Opportunity.” It has been a mecca for immigrants to settle and be free to make their own opportunity. For some, this is an opportunity to steal and rob. Such is the case of Sang-Hyun “Jimmy” Park.
Park was the leader of an identity theft and fraud ring that reached from northern New Jersey to U.S. territories in the Pacific.
He admitted that he had helped people fraudulently obtain credit cards, bank accounts and loans using illegally obtained Social Security numbers in a scheme that federal authorities say defrauded various credit card companies, banks and lenders out of about $4 million.
Park is the 54th Korean immigrant charged with identity theft since September 2010. Park and his cohorts made millions of dollars.
He and his co-conspirators operated a scheme to buy Social Security cards from brokers who fraudulently obtained them from Asian immigrants — mostly Chinese nationals — working in American territories, including Guam, American Samoa and Saipan.
The cards were then resold to Korean immigrants in the territorial U.S. who used them to apply for driver’s licenses in California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nevada, New York and elsewhere. Several of the defendants then used their U.S. identifications to apply for credit cards. Some used all the credit they obtained to buy luxury goods such as vehicles, designer bags or liquor, some of it to resell.
Good Intentions (at the beginning)
The 45-year-old native of South Korea lives in Palisades Park, a town just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan that is home to a large Korean population. He emigrated from Seoul in 1999 to start a business importing raw materials from Central America to manufacture hats in New Jersey.
According to his scumbag attorney, US restrictions on imported goods caused Park’s business to crumble so he turned to illegal activities.
Park ran the operation by using shell businesses, advertising the sale of U.S. identity documents in local Korean-language newspapers and employing a staff that included identity document brokers, people who worked to increase credit limits and boost scores for customers using the fraudulently obtained credit cards and local merchants who would swipe the cards at their businesses to get banks to transmit them money, according to court documents.
This is one very bad case of an immigrant gone sour. There are millions of Korean immigrants who use the great freedoms this country offers for both the good of their family and the good of society.