A year after Judicial Watch reported a rise in illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to obtain authentic U.S. passports and drivers’ licenses, the feds have busted a Massachusetts operation run by corrupt state workers. The state employees sold drivers’ licenses and state identification cards to illegal immigrants who bought Puerto Rican documents on the black market, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). The operation perpetuated voter fraud because some of the false identities and addresses were used to vote in Boston, the state’s capital and largest city.

The case is the latest of many illustrating that there’s an epidemic of voter fraud in the U.S. that’s seldom reported in the mainstream media. It’s not clear how many false identities and addresses were used to fraudulently register to vote in Boston, but the feds indicate that it occurred in multiple cases and Judicial Watch is investigating the matter as part of a five-year-old Election Integrity Project. The scheme was operated by four taxpayer-funded employees at the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) along with two outside accomplices who sold Puerto Rican documents to illegal aliens. All six were recently arrested and charged with aggravated identity theft. They probably never would have been caught if not for an anonymous tip received by the Massachusetts State Police nearly two years ago and there’s no telling how long the illicit scheme operated.

The anonymous letter said that a corrupt RMV employee was providing stolen identifications and drivers’ licenses to individuals seeking false IDs, the DOJ announcement states. An investigation ensued and authorities discovered that the four clerks were working with a document vendor and document dealer to provide the licenses and official state ID cards to illegal immigrants in exchange for cash. “The scheme involved several steps,” the DOJ says. First, the document dealer sold a Puerto Rican birth certificate and U.S. Social Security card to the document vendor for approximately $900. The vendor would then sell the stolen identities for more than $2,000 to illegal aliens—some with criminal records—seeking legitimate identities in Massachusetts. After the first layer of illicit transactions occurred, the counterfeit documents and false identities and addresses were used to fraudulently register clients to vote in Boston.

Illegal aliens would then bring the stolen identities to the RMV where the corrupt clerks worked and they would accept cash to illegally issue authentic documents, including drivers’ licenses and ID cards. “The clerks also accepted cash to use the RMV’s system to run queries, including Social Security number audits, to confirm that the identities the clients were stealing actually belonged to verifiable individuals,” the DOJ announcement states. The unscrupulous state workers face up to two years in prison, according to the feds, who won’t reveal the magnitude of the operation and how many authentic state documents were issued fraudulently to illegal aliens.

Last year Judicial Watch published a story about the increasing number of illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to obtain authentic American documents. Located about 1,000 miles southeast of Florida, Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory about two decades after the Caribbean island was acquired from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American war. Puerto Ricans are American citizens at birth though they don’t have the right to vote in federal elections and the island has only one non-voting representative in Congress. In recent years a record number of Puerto Ricans have left their troubled island for the U.S. and a big chunk has settled on Florida. A recent study found that the island’s ongoing economic recession has led to a mass exodus not seen in more than five decades. The U.S. government and its various agencies accept Puerto Rican birth certificates blindly even though fraud involving the easily forged documents has been pervasive for years.