FAKE ROBBERY RINGMASTER GETS TWO YEARS AFTER STAGING HUNDREDS OF ARMED HOLDUP TO GAME THE VISA SYSTEM
Parth Nayi turned the U-visa program into a cash machine. The 29-year-old from Woodridge, Illinois, organized hundreds of staged armed robberies between 2022 and 2024 so thousands of foreign nationals could pose as crime victims and claim special immigration status reserved for people who actually suffer real violence.
Participants paid Nayi $5,000 to $30,000 each in cash. He recruited the “victims,” paid off store owners to use their locations, hired people to act as robbers, and coached everyone on the script. Fake robbers brandished firearms and sometimes struck the supposed victims to make the scenes look convincing. The staged holdups hit Subway restaurants, Dunkin’ shops, Tropical Smoothie Cafes, liquor stores, gas stations, and convenience stores across the Chicago area and in places like Louisiana and Tennessee.
Prosecutors said Nayi sat at the center of nearly every one of the hundreds of phony crimes. He made at least $2 million by a conservative estimate and possibly upward of $3 million. At one point he kept more than a million dollars in cash inside his house while gambling heavily.
One of the performances went wrong. On July 13, 2023, three masked men entered Bucktown Food & Liquor in Chicago for what was supposed to be a controlled holdup. One of them accidentally fired a handgun and shot a 26-year-old store employee in the abdomen. The clerk was critically injured but survived. The crew fled in a stolen Kia.
U.S. District Judge Mary M. Rowland called Nayi the “puppeteer” of the scheme and said the sentencing guidelines looked “woefully inadequate” for what he admitted doing. Prosecutors had asked for 12 months. His lawyer asked for probation. Rowland gave him two years in federal prison and a $50,000 fine. The maximum on the charge was five years. Five co-conspirators, including Kewon Young and several Patels, have also been convicted.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Saqib Mohammad Hussain wrote that Nayi “significantly corrupted the federal U Visa program, designed to provide a benefit to a particularly vulnerable group—foreign nationals who are victims of serious crimes while visiting the United States.”
The U-visa exists for real crime victims who help law enforcement. Nayi and his customers manufactured the crimes instead. Police departments responded to fake 911 calls. Local agencies certified the phony victims. Those certifications then went into fraudulent applications for status that can lead to permanent residency. Over 100 people were identified as having benefited, most of Latin and South American origin, while prosecutors say thousands were involved overall.
A real employee took a bullet because people wanted a shortcut through the immigration system. The man who ran the factory got two years.
SOURCES
Chicago Tribune, October 22, 2026
CWB Chicago, October 23, 2026
U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Illinois
Fox 32 Chicago
CBS Chicago
Government sentencing memorandum, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Case 1:24-cr-00220