A high-ranking U.S. National Guard officer has admitted to orchestrating an elaborate multi-year fraud and bigamy scheme that exploited government resources and forged official records to maintain a secret double life, federal prosecutors have confirmed. Forty-year-old Major Collin Welch entered a guilty plea this Tuesday to two key criminal charges: the theft of roughly $54,000 in public funds, and the illegal inducement of a Mongolian woman and her daughter to remain in the United States beyond the terms of their legal visas. He is currently awaiting a sentencing hearing at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., with no date for the proceeding publicly announced as of yet.
The deceptive scheme traces back to 2019, when Welch was deployed with the Alaska National Guard to a posting at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It was during this assignment that he met the woman who would become his second wife, and their romantic relationship continued even after he completed his posting and returned to Alaska in 2021. He relocated to Arkansas the following year, and the pair held their first marriage ceremony in Mongolia in 2022. To secure this marriage, Welch created a forged divorce decree that falsely claimed his first marriage to his original spouse had been legally dissolved, court documents show.
By 2023, Welch had moved to Washington, D.C., alongside his first family, having accepted a new position with the District of Columbia National Guard that required frequent international travel. To keep his double life hidden, he repeatedly misused his official government travel card to rent local hotel rooms in the Washington area, where he would take video calls with his second wife. This subterfuge prevented her from discovering he was actually living full-time with his first family in the district. He also submitted fraudulent reimbursement claims to the federal government and lied to his chain of command to get unauthorized approval for international trips to visit his second spouse, according to the official statement of facts filed alongside his plea agreement.
Earlier this year, Welch used government funds to cover plane tickets for the Mongolian woman and her daughter to relocate to the United States. After their arrival, he held a second marriage ceremony in Virginia, once again lying about his marital status by claiming he had never been married before. He covered all their living expenses for an apartment in Northern Virginia, but the arrangement collapsed late last year when he attempted to pay rent using forged checks, resulting in the pair being evicted from the unit.
Throughout the time the two were living in the U.S., Welch was fully aware that their tourist visas had long expired. To maintain the lie that their residency was legal, he forged a wide array of fake official records, including forged correspondence from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, fake Social Security cards, and a falsified Department of Defense letter that falsely claimed the pair were enrolled in the U.S. military’s health insurance program.
In a statement provided to the court, Welch’s defense attorney Gregory Rosen acknowledged that repeated long-distance deployments — including overseas assignments to Afghanistan and Djibouti, and years spent separated from his first family — created significant personal strain that contributed to Welch’s choices. Even so, Rosen emphasized that his client accepts full accountability for every illegal action he took, noting that this willingness to take responsibility reveals more about Welch’s character than the list of offensive acts alone can convey.