U.S. Seizes 14 7-Eleven Stores in Immigration Raids

Through the scheme, the defendants, who as franchisees for the parent company were licensed to use 7-Eleven buildings, trademarks and Slurpee and hot dog machines, recruited more than 50 illegal immigrants and gave them identities stolen from American citizens, including children and dead people.       

The employees worked for 100 hours a week but were paid for a fraction of that time, and were forced to live in substandard housing owned by the operators of the convenience stores, the authorities said.       

The store managers escaped notice, some for more than a decade, because the national company, 7-Eleven Inc., which has more than 7,600 stores in the United States, did not have safeguards in place to protect its payroll system from employee fraud, the authorities said. For example, two immigrant employees, one in New York and one in Virginia, used the same Social Security number to get paid.       

There was “little to no effort to insure the integrity of their payroll system,” said Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office helped investigate the case.      

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