It started with a simple pull-over in Flower Mound, Texas, but it ended this month with two women heading to federal prison for a combined 17.5 years.
What looked like a routine police stop quickly spiraled into a massive investigation by the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), revealing a high-stakes identity theft ring that spanned multiple states and drained millions from unsuspecting victims.
Ciera Julieth Blas, a 32-year-old from Brooklyn, NY, received a 120-month sentence on April 7, 2026.
Her partner in the scheme, 41-year-old Kelly Josek of Manhattan, had already been handed a 90-month sentence back in January. Both women pleaded guilty to fraud and the misuse of visas and permits, marking the conclusion of a years-long chase by federal agents.
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The house of cards began to wobble when Flower Mound officers found seven fake U.S. passport cards and matching bank cards inside a car driven by Blas.
Sensing a much larger operation, local police looped in the DSS. Investigators eventually discovered that the duo wasn’t just dabbling in petty theft; they were using the stolen identities of over 80 people to manufacture professional-grade counterfeit passports.
These documents allowed them to walk into banks nationwide and bleed accounts dry through wires and cash withdrawals.
While the immediate damage was pegged at $1.3 million, federal analysts later linked Blas to a staggering $8 million in fraud involving roughly 2,500 victims.
“Ciera Blas’s sentencing follows several years of unceasing investigative work,” said Ryan Pack, Special Agent in Charge of the DSS Houston Field Office. “This significant penalty demonstrates the seriousness with which we pursue fraud involving counterfeit U.S. passport cards.”
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The road to justice wasn’t a straight line. After an initial arrest in 2022, Blas vanished, skipping out on her pre-trial release to continue the scam under new aliases.
It took a coordinated effort between DSS, the U.S. Marshals, and the Secret Service to track her to a Houston-area home leased under a fake name. When agents finally raided the house in January 2025, they didn’t just find Blas—they found a literal “fraud factory” filled with counterfeit Treasury checks, firearms, and the raw materials used to build fake IDs.
The duo was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas under “Operation Take Back America,” a federal initiative designed to dismantle the networks that compromise the security of U.S. travel documents. For Blas and Josek, the operation lived up to its name, effectively taking them off the streets and ending a multi-million dollar spree of digital and physical deception.
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