Real travel documents used to fake identity as forgery becomes harder
By Teh Joo Lin 24 August 2009
As travel documents get harder to fake, a different type of passport fraud has surfaced in Singapore.
It involves foreigners who come to work here without legal papers and then want to get out of the country without the long arm of the law catching up with them.
The racket involves a would-be illegal immigrant, who enters the country on his own passport, and then quickly sells it to someone else who can use it to leave the country.
The going rate is $200 to $400, with a commission going to a middleman.
When it is time to leave for home, he pays for a passport himself from another newly arrived countryman, makes himself up to look like the passport photograph, and then uses it to get through the checkpoints.
If he succeeds, he would have been able to work and live here illegally for an amount of time.
Passport cheats are resorting to posing as genuine passport holders now that new and high-tech immigration documents have got much harder to forge, said Superintendent Sri Ramulunaidu, head of investigations at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA).
‘So they might as well take a chance...unless the passport is very well done, which is very expensive,’ he said.
There are other methods being tried to con the border authorities as well, like substituting the photograph in the passport for one’s own. Another is to replace the biodata pages of genuine passports with forged ones.
In total, ICA caught some 3,600 passport fraudsters last year, about 1,000 more than in 2006.
Fraud involving foreign passports can result in up to 10 years’ jail and a $10,000 fine. Foreigners who have overstayed for fewer than 90 days can be jailed up to six months or fined up to $4,000, or both. Those caught after having stayed for longer periods face even stiffer penalties
Three cases of illegals posing as someone else were cracked in May this year.
One involved Vellaisamy Lakshmanakumar, a 24-year-old Indian national, who came into Singapore by train in February.
Soon after he arrived, he met up with a fellow Indian national, an overstayer, in Tekka. An unknown third party had arranged the meeting, according to court documents.
The overstayer wanted to fly home, so he paid Vellaisamy $100 for his Indian passport, which had a 30-day visit pass that was still valid. Vellaisamy stayed on but was arrested in May. He was sentenced to six months’ jail and a $1,500 fine.
Passport fraud is the bane of immigration officials worldwide, whose main concern is that terrorists may sneak in to do harm.
For example, Kuwait-born Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, had entered the United States on a stolen Iraqi passport.
With millions of stolen or lost travel documents in circulation around the world, Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble has said that access to fraudulent passports is ‘the Number One’ global security problem.
‘In every major terrorist attack that’s occurred recently, you can find fraudulent travel documents tied or linked in some way,’ he told NBC News.
While most passport fraud cases picked up here involve foreigners, there have been instances of Singapore passports falling into the wrong hands.
Many of these documents are lost or stolen, but there are also Singaporeans who have been suspected of having sold their passports to syndicates for sums of about $1,000. No one so far has been caught.
Singapore passports are popular because they allow their holders to enter many countries without a visa, said Mr. Kum Leong Kay, head of the ICA’s Identity Authentication & Document Analysis Branch.
In June, United States Customs & Border Protection officers in Alaska intercepted a Federal Express shipment which contained three genuine Singapore passports. The original photographs had been substituted with those of others.
The passports were hidden with driver licences and identification cards in the hollowed-out pages of a magazine. The package, which was bound for Ecuador, bore a Malaysian return address.
ICA investigators traced the passports back to their Singaporean owners, aged 25 and 27.
While all three men claimed they had lost their documents between 2006 and last year, they are under investigation because they did not report the loss within the mandatory two weeks.
But there are increasingly fewer cases of Singapore passport abuse detected here and abroad. There were 33 cases last year, a drop from 64 in 2007. One reason could be the change to the Passport Act in 2007, which ratcheted up the penalties for possessing and selling Singapore passports to a maximum of 10 years’ jail and a $10,000 fine.
Another could be the introduction of the biometric passport in 2006, which makes tampering and forgery much more difficult. For example, the photographs cannot be substituted as they are laser engraved. No case of passport fraud has been linked to the new biometric documents so far.
If this is a way to beat fraud for now, then perhaps cases will start dwindling as more countries begin introducing biometric features on their passports.
But even as more countries hop onto the biometric bandwagon, Mr. Kum said: ‘I believe as technology advances, syndicates will try to adapt. It’s a game of catch-up. So we always have to be more advanced than them...and improve our own passport.’
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More passport cheats nabbed
Real travel documents used to fake identity as forgery becomes harder
By Teh Joo Lin
24 August 2009
As travel documents get harder to fake, a different type of passport fraud has surfaced in Singapore.
It involves foreigners who come to work here without legal papers and then want to get out of the country without the long arm of the law catching up with them.
The racket involves a would-be illegal immigrant, who enters the country on his own passport, and then quickly sells it to someone else who can use it to leave the country.
The going rate is $200 to $400, with a commission going to a middleman.
When it is time to leave for home, he pays for a passport himself from another newly arrived countryman, makes himself up to look like the passport photograph, and then uses it to get through the checkpoints.
If he succeeds, he would have been able to work and live here illegally for an amount of time.
Passport cheats are resorting to posing as genuine passport holders now that new and high-tech immigration documents have got much harder to forge, said Superintendent Sri Ramulunaidu, head of investigations at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA).
‘So they might as well take a chance...unless the passport is very well done, which is very expensive,’ he said.
There are other methods being tried to con the border authorities as well, like substituting the photograph in the passport for one’s own. Another is to replace the biodata pages of genuine passports with forged ones.
In total, ICA caught some 3,600 passport fraudsters last year, about 1,000 more than in 2006.
Fraud involving foreign passports can result in up to 10 years’ jail and a $10,000 fine. Foreigners who have overstayed for fewer than 90 days can be jailed up to six months or fined up to $4,000, or both. Those caught after having stayed for longer periods face even stiffer penalties
Three cases of illegals posing as someone else were cracked in May this year.
One involved Vellaisamy Lakshmanakumar, a 24-year-old Indian national, who came into Singapore by train in February.
Soon after he arrived, he met up with a fellow Indian national, an overstayer, in Tekka. An unknown third party had arranged the meeting, according to court documents.
The overstayer wanted to fly home, so he paid Vellaisamy $100 for his Indian passport, which had a 30-day visit pass that was still valid. Vellaisamy stayed on but was arrested in May. He was sentenced to six months’ jail and a $1,500 fine.
Passport fraud is the bane of immigration officials worldwide, whose main concern is that terrorists may sneak in to do harm.
For example, Kuwait-born Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, had entered the United States on a stolen Iraqi passport.
With millions of stolen or lost travel documents in circulation around the world, Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble has said that access to fraudulent passports is ‘the Number One’ global security problem.
‘In every major terrorist attack that’s occurred recently, you can find fraudulent travel documents tied or linked in some way,’ he told NBC News.
While most passport fraud cases picked up here involve foreigners, there have been instances of Singapore passports falling into the wrong hands.
Many of these documents are lost or stolen, but there are also Singaporeans who have been suspected of having sold their passports to syndicates for sums of about $1,000. No one so far has been caught.
Singapore passports are popular because they allow their holders to enter many countries without a visa, said Mr. Kum Leong Kay, head of the ICA’s Identity Authentication & Document Analysis Branch.
In June, United States Customs & Border Protection officers in Alaska intercepted a Federal Express shipment which contained three genuine Singapore passports. The original photographs had been substituted with those of others.
The passports were hidden with driver licences and identification cards in the hollowed-out pages of a magazine. The package, which was bound for Ecuador, bore a Malaysian return address.
ICA investigators traced the passports back to their Singaporean owners, aged 25 and 27.
While all three men claimed they had lost their documents between 2006 and last year, they are under investigation because they did not report the loss within the mandatory two weeks.
But there are increasingly fewer cases of Singapore passport abuse detected here and abroad. There were 33 cases last year, a drop from 64 in 2007. One reason could be the change to the Passport Act in 2007, which ratcheted up the penalties for possessing and selling Singapore passports to a maximum of 10 years’ jail and a $10,000 fine.
Another could be the introduction of the biometric passport in 2006, which makes tampering and forgery much more difficult. For example, the photographs cannot be substituted as they are laser engraved. No case of passport fraud has been linked to the new biometric documents so far.
If this is a way to beat fraud for now, then perhaps cases will start dwindling as more countries begin introducing biometric features on their passports.
But even as more countries hop onto the biometric bandwagon, Mr. Kum said: ‘I believe as technology advances, syndicates will try to adapt. It’s a game of catch-up. So we always have to be more advanced than them...and improve our own passport.’
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