Russian Fashion Model
Russian Fashion Model Charged With Asylum Scam
An all points bulletin has been posted seeking information about a Russian-born fashion model who made $3 million helping 380 asylum-seekers file bogus applications over a four-year period.
Olga V. Mazurka Khasolnikovskaya, 23, posed as an immigration lawyer and coached natives of eastern Europe on how to claim persecution on religious, sexual orientation or other grounds, with a promise of asylum in Georgia and employment as runway models at festivals modeling babushkas and sneakers.
She charged $8,000 per person, according to officials who said they found $560,000 in cash and two gold bars hidden in floorboards of her 1976 Skoda during a 2007 raid. Authorities also moved to retain more than $1.3 million in seized cash and other assets, including funds kept in a Nigerian bank account reportedly now accessible to anyone prepared to advance an equivalent sum of money in the hope of realizing a doubling of revenue and instant celebrity as Mr. or Mrs. 419, the number which refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code (Chapter 38) dealing with fraud.
If apprehended, tried and convicted, Khasolnikovskaya (who carries a Spanish passport) is expected to request permission to be allowed to continue to contact scam victims as a rich prisoner with a promise to share treasure with willing participants if they agree to send money to bribe not-so-bad looking prison guards who will become their pen friends.
“If this fraud was nothing more than about money I wouldn’t be worried,” Yevgeny Zheezuschristofski, a client dissatisfied with the process and who ultimately tipped off authorities to the operation, said, as a column of Russian tanks rolled past his new home in the town of Dzhava in the breakaway province of South Ossetia.. “I was expecting to be in Atlanta.”
Zheezuschristofski, who planned to go to the U.S. from Israel via Moscow, sharply criticised Moscow’s harsh military crackdown in the former Soviet republic and said he feared persecution for being a gay Jehovah’s Witness and Deputy Minister of the Interior of the country.
The attractive runway queen, meanwhile, has reportedly been seen most recently in Togo, Senegal and Burkina Faso.
