Your Passport Looks Only 50 Percent Real

Would you ever purchase a fake passport?

By Joshlin Sheridan, Marketing —

Many people use Facebook to buy and sell a variety of objects such as textbooks, furniture, and clothing. Most of these “indoor yard sale” pages are perfectly legal, but several sketchier pages boast selling fake passports. This black market of identity fraud isn’t undercover; it’s completely transparent on social media!

Would You Like to Buy a British Passport?

Recent reports uncovered several black market passport Facebook pages, including one called ‘European Passports For Sale VIP,’ which offered fake passports ranging from $1,000-4,000. The lower priced passports, the sellers claimed, only looked “50 percent real” while the more expensive ones looked “90 percent real.” The risk you took in buying depended on how you’d like to use the passport and how much money you were willing to spend. The sellers claimed no responsibility for how the passports were used. Some passports were copied from legitimate, identifiable persons without their knowledge! This causes a serious risk to the identity of these citizens.

Taking Precautions

Because Facebook actively tries to weed out counterfeit items, Facebook security deleted these illegal passport pages and suspended the group admins. However, it’s likely that other private groups exist on social media and that more will be created. It’s more important now than ever for security and immigration agencies to take precautions when administering, handling, and verifying passports.

Issuing Valid Passports

In order to reduce fraud when people apply for government-issued passports, IdentityDetect™ is a viable solution. This web-based and mobile app technology verifies the identities of people when they answer simple questions about themselves. This identity verification service is a nonintrusive test that monitors variations in motor nervous system responses. Integrating this technology yields accurate and quick results, and could reduce the number of falsified passports created.

Source
Photo by / Nicole Harrington