Passport Fraud, Other Schemes, Land Maryland Couple Behind Bars
A Maryland woman will join her husband in federal prison for a myriad of fraud schemes including creating fake documents to obtain U.S. passports for her husband’s children.
45-year-old Charmaine Miesha Brown was sentenced to 30 months behind bars, three years’ supervised release, and ordered to pay over $128,000 in restitution.
Passport Fraud Details
The Brown case begins in 2014 when she married Ghanaian national Andrews Oduro.
Prosecutors say that from December 2014 through April 2021, Brown and Oduro worked together to obtain U.S. passports from Oduro’s children, some of whom were not U.S. citizens.
According to court documents, Brown allegedly applied for a passport in the name of one child who was a U.S. citizen but had the picture of another Oduro child who was not a U.S. citizen. That child then used the fraudulently obtained passport to travel from Ghana into the U.S.
The couple then allegedly applied again for a passport for another non-U.S. citizen child, using a false Ghanaian birth certificate that claimed that Brown was the child’s mother. That fraudulent passport was approved, and the child used it to travel into the U.S.
In addition to the passport fraud, prosecutors say Brown and Oduro conspired to receive payments from the state of Maryland’s Child Care Scholarship Program to which they were not entitled. Brown falsely reported that a friend was watching her children and that Oduro was an “absent parent” even though he was living in the same house in order to obtain the child care payments.
Lastly, Brown and Oduro are accused of bankruptcy fraud, for defrauding creditors and a bankruptcy trustee in a fraudulent Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition.
Court records show the couple used the name and partial social security number of another individual to proceed with that claim.
Andrews Oduro previously pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 28 months in prison.
The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, the Social Security Administration Office of Inspector General, and the Department of Homeland Security - Office of Inspector General were among the agencies who investigated.
