Maryland woman sentenced for passport, bankruptcy fraud

GREENBELT, MD—A Maryland woman has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in federal prison for her involvement in multiple fraud schemes, including passport fraud and bankruptcy fraud.

According to the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland, Charmaine Brown, 45, of Lusby, was sentenced Wednesday. She will also serve three years of supervised release after her prison sentence and has been ordered to pay $128,201.22 in restitution.

Brown was married to a Ghanaian national, Andrews Brown, who was granted legal permanent resident status in the US in 2021. The two are accused of working together to obtain U.S. passports for Brown’s children, who are non-US citizens, through fraudulent means.

In 2014, Brown is believed to have submitted an application for a passport in the name of one of her children, but with the photo of another child, who is Ghanaian, on the application. The child was then taken to the US using the fraudulently obtained passport.

In a similar scheme, Brown and her husband are believed to have applied for a passport in the name of a non-US citizen child in 2015 and again in 2020, providing fraudulent Ghanaian birth certificates in support of the applications.

The Lusby woman is also accused of defrauding creditors and a bankruptcy trustee by filing a fraudulent petition in 2018, seeking the discharge of thousands of dollars in debts and taxes owed to the state of Maryland. She faces additional charges in the case.

This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by a human editor.

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