CHICAGO — A federal judge has sentenced the leader of a brazen scheme to stage armed robberies to qualify for U.S. immigration visas to two years in prison.

U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland sentenced Parth Nayi on Thursday to a year longer than the term recommended by prosecutors. Nayi’s attorney, George Gomez, had asked for probation. The judge also fined him $50,000.

Nayi, 29, of Woodridge, was one of six people accused in a 2024 indictment of conspiring to pay actors to play “robbers” and set up phony crimes at locations like Subway restaurants, Dunkin’ donut shops, liquor stores, gas stations and a smoothie shack.

The goal was to use the phony crimes to apply for U nonimmigrant status, also known as a “U-visa,” which is set aside under an anti-trafficking law enacted in 2000 for crime victims who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful in an investigation or prosecution.

During the staged robberies, the purported robbers brandished what appeared to be real guns and, in some instances, struck the phony “victims” to make the crimes appear real, according to prosecutors. The robberies were then reported to local police.

Afterward, some of the victims submitted forms to obtain certification “that they were victims of a qualifying crime and had been or would be helpful in the investigation,” according to prosecutors.

Nayi pleaded guilty in January.

Prosecutors, in a sentencing memorandum filed earlier this month, had requested the court impose a guidelines-damage sentence of 12 months in prison and a fine of $250,000.

But in her remarks, Rowland said the sentencing guidelines seemed “woefully inadequate” for what Nayi admitted doing. She called him the “puppeteer” of the scheme, noting he helped organize fake armed robberies across the country that caused thousands of people to file for access to U-visas under the crime victim immigration policies. He was paid upward of $3 million over three years by the co-conspirators. At one point, he kept more than a million dollars in cash inside his house and gambled heavily. He was only in his late 20s, the judge said.

Nayi was at the center “of almost every single one of the hundreds of staged robberies that were perpetrated,” according to prosecutors. He worked with other co-organizers to recruit fake victims, paid off store owners to use their locations for the staged robberies, recruited and coordinated with fake robbers, coached the fake victims through the plan and facilitated the submission of their false U-visa applications afterward, prosecutors stated in court filings.

“In the process, (Nayi) significantly corrupted the federal U visa program, designed to provide a benefit to a particularly vulnerable group, foreign nationals who are victims of serious crimes while visiting the United States,” the government wrote in its sentencing memo.

Nayi’s attorney, meanwhile, had argued probation was adequate. Gomez, in a defense sentencing filing, maintained that Nayi had no prior criminal record and had “complied with every condition of release and appeared at every court date” since his arrest and indictment nearly two and a half years ago.

Gomez stated that his client “accepts responsibility for his part” in conspiring to exploit a program that exists to protect genuine victims of crime and didn’t wish to minimize the seriousness of the offense but added that “the offense must … be assessed in context.” The attorney, in his memo, said the offense was nonviolent and that the “real harm here was to the integrity of a government program.”

On Thursday, Rowland, however, said Nayi has shown little remorse. In fact, he testified at the trial of his co-defendant, Rajnikumar Patel, that he wished he’d known about the U-visa program when his mother and father were robbed a decade ago, because “I would have started doing this back then and I could have made millions more.”

“Talk about lack of acceptance of responsibility,” Rowland said. “He really was saying I don’t really regret anything that happened. I wish I would have done it sooner.”

Of the six indicted in the scheme, three others have already been sentenced to terms ranging from probation to time served. Another leader of the conspiracy, Kewon Young, 31, of Mansfield, Ohio, has pleaded guilty and is due to be sentenced early next year. A date for Patel’s sentencing has not been set.

During his trial in Chicago earlier this summer, Patel failed to show up on the third day of proceedings and was later arrested in Alabama. Patel faces enhanced prison time due to his flight while on bond.

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