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NC Student Visa Scam Ends With Guilty Plea

The Homeland Security Department headquarters in northwest Washington, June 5, 2015. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

A North Carolina woman has pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with the school she ran in Charlotte.

Evelyn Mack pleaded guilty to felony charges of concealing, harboring or shielding unlawful aliens. Authorities say she took foreign teens coveted by basketball recruiters and enrolled them in her small private school.

The Charlotte Observer reports that court documents indicate she falsely represented about 75 teens as students in the Evelyn Mack Academy, taking about $1,000 per player from recruiters to do so.

She had run the school since 2000, and was authorized to enroll high school students under F1 visas. Those visas allow non-immigrant foreign citizens temporary entry into the U.S. to study.

Authorities say she entered false information into the Department of Homeland Security system to avoid detection by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mack faces up to ten years in prison.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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