Fake passport online?

Fraudsters, terrorists and miscreants of all sorts can now travel more easily across borders because they no longer have to pay big bucks to the shady passport maker down the alley. They can quickly find quality, affordable fake passports at several websites on the "dark web."

I looked on the dark web (hidden areas where criminals sometimes lurk) and found many sites offering bogus passports. I'll highlight two among thousands around the world.

One site contains small print that reads, "We are selling original UK Passports made with your info/picture. Also, your info will get entered into the official passport database. So its [sic] possible to travel with our passports. … You can even enter the UK/EU with our passports, we can just add a stamp for the country you are in! Ideal for people who want to work in the EU/UK." The cost is £2000 or 12.883 bitcoins.

Another site offers U.S. passports and even citizenship! The small print reads, "We offer bulletproof USA passports + SSN + Drivers License and Birth Certificate and other papers making you an official citizen of the USA! It will even work if you arent [sic] in the USA yet.

"How we do it? Trade secret! But we can assure you that you wont [sic] have any problems with our papers.

"We are shipping documents from the USA, international shipping is no problem. You can use your own name or a new name!

"Information on how to send us required info (scanned signature, biometric picture etc.) will be given after purchase."

The cost is $5,900 or 24.748 bitcoins.

No doubt some of the scores of fake-passport sites are fraudulent traps. After all, victims — who are criminals themselves — aren't going to report their activities to the authorities.

But you don't need to go to the dark web to find such services. A Google search on "novelty id" or "replacement bank accounts" reveals millions of results. A quick trawl shows websites that offer to replace wage slips, tax documents, bank accounts, utility bills, identity cards and passports. Some even offer buy-one, get-one free services!

The terms and conditions on most of these sites say that buyers purchase with the understanding they won't use the documents for unlawful purposes, and the seller supplies them with the understanding that the documents are for "novelty and entertainment purposes only." Ha! These caveats are intended as defenses against any prosecution. However, in the U.K., the Fraud Act 2006, section 6, says a person is guilty of an offense "if he has in his possession or under his control any article for use in the course of or in connection with any fraud." Considering the overall content of these sites — copy extolling the products' quality, printing techniques and security fixtures versus the fine-print disclaimers — I doubt if any jury would give the site owners or customers the benefit of doubt. (For example, see: www.replaceyourdocs.co.uk.)

Most of these sites, of course, don't contain postal addresses. A "whois" search of sites' IP addresses reveals companies outside the jurisdiction of the host targets. For example, a website selling fake U.K. passports and documents could reside in Sweden or might even change the location of its servers and company every six months to avoid investigation and detection.

Fake passports in terrorism plots

Robert A. Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and a political science professor at the University of Chicago, in his 2014 paper, Identity Fraud and Terrorism: The Threat of Stolen Passports, gave the following examples of terrorists using false passports:

• Before 9/11, Al-Qaeda established an office in the Kandahar airport solely dedicated to creating falsified identification documents for its operatives. Al-Qaeda also collected fighters' passports before they entered Afghanistan's front lines so it could recycle them if the fighters died.
• Ramzi Yousef, who led the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, entered the U.S. with a stolen Iraqi passport.
• Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the operational leader in the 1998 embassy bombing in Kenya that killed more than 200 people, entered and exited Kenya on a stolen passport.
• Kenyan police, in a September 2013 raid, found a fake South African passport that Samantha Lewthwaite allegedly used. Lewthwaite, the wife of one of the 7/7 London Bombers and known as the "white widow," is suspected of participating in the Nairobi 2013 Westgate mall attack.

Preventing bogus passports

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.K.'s Metropolitan Police, under Operations Genesius and Maximum, have entered into arrangements with the printing industry to reduce the access of criminals to needed equipment and supplies to produce false documents.

ICE reports in its Genesius brochure that "document fraud is a gateway crime that paves the way for additional criminal offenses," including:

• Identity theft.
• Human smuggling and trafficking.
• Gang activity.
• Financial fraud.
• Terrorism and other national security threats.
• Illegal immigration.

"Criminal and terrorist organizations pay top dollar for quality counterfeits, which they commonly use to facilitate their illicit activities," the brochure continues. "For example, reports indicate that the al Qaeda terrorist organization and 9/11 hijackers made use of fraudulent passports, visas, and entry and exit stamps in their international travels." The brochure provides details of how companies can assist ICE in the prevention of false documents.

Enforcement isn't so prevalent around the rest of the world.

"Fake passports and identity fraud in general is a massive problem in Thailand," says police commander and Thailand's Interpol director, Apichart Suriboonya, in a March 10, 2014, Reuters article, Thailand grapples with ‘massive' fake passport racket, by Amy Sawitta Lefevre.

Lefevre reports that between January 2012 and June 2013 more than 60,000 Thai and foreign passports were stolen in Thailand, according to the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Interpol manages a database of 45 million records of Stolen or Lost Travel Documents from 167 countries, but only a handful of countries regularly use it to screen international passengers; four out of 10 remain unscreened according to a March 9, 2014, Associated Press article in Aljazeera, Interpol Failure to check passports for flights all too common.

The SLTD database, starting with a few thousand records from just 10 countries in 2002, has grown exponentially. At the end of 2014, it contained information on more than 45 million travel documents (passports, identity documents, visas) reported lost or stolen by 169 countries. Member countries searched the database more than one billion times in 2014, which resulted in nearly 72,000 positive responses.

The U.S. National Security Council's July 2011 report, Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, says that transnational organized crime "poses a significant and growing threat to national and international security, with dire implications for public safety, public health, democratic institutions, and economic stability across the globe. Not only are criminal networks expanding, but they are also diversifying their activities, resulting in the convergence of threats that were once distinct and today have explosive and destabilizing threats."

Some of those threats, the report says, are to the economy, crime-terror insurgency, human smuggling, weapons trafficking, drug trafficking and cybercrime.

The report says that those who connect these converging threats are " ‘facilitators,' semi-legitimate players such as accountants, attorneys, notaries, bankers, and real estate brokers, who cross both the licit and illicit worlds and provide services to legitimate customers, criminals, and terrorists alike."

The report says that the range of licit-illicit relationships is broad. "At one end, criminals draw on the public reputations of licit actors to maintain facades of propriety for their operations. At the other end are ‘specialists' with skills or resources who have been completely subsumed into the criminal networks.

For example, TOC [transnational organized crime] networks rely on industry experts, both witting and unwitting, to facilitate corrupt transactions and to create the necessary infrastructure to pursue their illicit schemes, such as creating shell corporations, opening offshore bank accounts in the shell corporation's name, and creating front businesses for their illegal activity and money laundering [my emphasis]," according to the report.

"Business owners or bankers are enlisted to launder money, and employees of legitimate companies are used to conceal smuggling operations. Human smugglers, human traffickers, arms traffickers, drug traffickers, terrorists, and other criminals depend on secure transportation networks and safe locations from which to stage smuggling activity or to store bulk cash or narcotics for transport," according to the National Security Council report. "They also depend on fraudulently created or fraudulently obtained documents, such as passports and visas, to move themselves or their clients into the United States and illegally reside here [my emphasis]."

Checking the footprint

All of us leave "transactional footprints" from our lifestyles: our plane trips, domestic or international; drives or commuter train trips to work, the gym, clubs, volunteer events or entertainment activities. If you ever have to check a subject's passport, compare it with his or her footprint to verify identity rather than blindly accepting the official-looking document.

Just because "passport or recent utility bill" might be on your organization's list of "accepted documents," don't just tick the box; make sure the documents you examine relate to the person in front of you. Know your customer.

Look deeper, and check smaller, intimate details. Do they have any other supporting documentation, such as gym or medical cards? Check their social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Inspect their college and university transcripts.

If the person's footprint seems to conflict with the passport information, examine the passport's security features, such as glowing items under ultraviolet light or details of security marks often misprinted in fakes. Is the photograph a clear likeness of the individual, and is there any sign it might have been tampered with?

For further information on the visual examination of passports and references to related articles, see the brochure, Guide for the development of forensic document examination capacity, produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (See Annex 4 in the brochure for some excellent references.)

These checks take a little extra time, but remember that you're part of a long food chain, and you don't want to be an unwitting facilitator of crime. Stay vigilant. Now more than ever, your role is to not just fight fraud but to keep our countries safe.

Tim Harvey, CFE, JP, is director of the ACFE's UK Operations and a member of Transparency International and the British Society of Criminology.