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玛丽亚•埃琳娜•卡斯蒂略（右）在加州富勒顿西裔移民办公室与其他人一块申请入籍。

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Zach Intrater, assistant U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey, talks about avoiding immigration scams as he kicks off an awareness campaign in Newark, New Jersey.

Washington — To prevent crooks from defrauding legal immigrants and their families, the U.S. government is conducting a nationwide crackdown on fraud related to immigration services, says the U.S. Justice Department.

According to a March 20 blog post on the Justice Department’s website, immigration-services fraud schemes — sometimes called notario scams — prey on vulnerable individuals who are in the United States legally and are trying to abide by the rules.

U.S. officials warn that scammers often deliberately invite confusion by interchangeably using the Spanish word notario and the similar-sounding English word “notary,” but the two words have different meanings. In some Latin American countries, a notario is a lawyer, but in the United States, a “notary” — or, more properly, a “notary public” — is someone who witnesses and certifies legal documents, but does not have a law degree.

The Justice Department described how scammers typically approach their victims.

“Scammers often promise expert legal help (even though they’re not experts or lawyers) or say that they will speed up the immigration process (even though they can’t) or claim to be part of the government (even though they’re not),” said the department’s blog post. “They take upfront fees and often leave people worse off.” The Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch “is continuing to root out and prosecute these immigration-services fees,” the post said.

Federal prosecutors are already taking action against suspected offenders. In February, prosecutors announced the indictment of three people on fraud charges related to a Missouri company known as Immigration Forms and Publications.

The indictment alleges that the company “charged consumers hundreds of dollars up front for help in filling out and filing government immigration forms,” falsely identified employees as “immigration experts,” fraudulently claimed that the company handled “overload” calls for the U.S. government and “wrongly said that the money customers paid the company would cover government processing fees for the forms.”

Despite the company’s claims, its staffers “often did nothing beyond mail out blank immigration forms that anyone can get from the government for free,” the indictment says. Also, the indictment adds, the company “did not have any particular expertise in immigration matters,” and customers who sent completed forms to U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services “were surprised to learn that the fees they already paid the company” were not applied toward government processing fees.

Victims of immigration-services scams can report their experiences to the Federal Trade Commission and to officials in every U.S. state.

Information on how to avoid immigration-related scams is available in various languages on the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services website. That website also provides advice on finding authorized legal help for immigration issues.