Passports for sale on Facebook: Criminals peddle stolen and fake UK travel documents on social media for as little as £800
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Passports for sale on Facebook: Criminals peddle stolen and fake UK travel documents on social media for as little as £800
Black market British passports are being sold openly on social media.
Genuine and fake versions can be bought for as little as £800, a Daily Mail investigation shows.
One page on Facebook has been used to trade illegal British passports for at least three years.
We also found that passports cloned with details taken from real passports were being touted for a few hundred pounds on other easily-accessible websites. The revelations follow yesterday’s Mail investigation into how stolen British passports are spirited to Turkey to be sold by people smugglers.
David Ibsen, a security expert who advised the US government, said it was no surprise Facebook was being used to hawk passports that could fall into the hands of terrorists. ‘It is well known that extremists use Facebook as a tool to achieve their goals,’ he said. ‘The Mail is to be congratulated for exposing something that poses a genuine danger.
‘We continue to see Facebook failing to address its platform’s role in encouraging and proliferating terrorism.’
One Facebook page in Arabic – called European Passports For Sale VIP – features multiple pictures of British travel papers.
The site boasts: ‘We sell passports from £800 to £2,600. We are not traffickers. We’re just selling the passport and are not responsible for your travel or smuggling.’ The site says seven out of ten customers succeeded in making it past border control. But it offers entry stamps for an extra £170 to £280.
When an undercover Mail reporter asked to buy a UK passport, the seller quickly replied via the WhatsApp messaging service. He offered a genuine passport for £2,400, another at £1,700 that looked ‘90 per cent real’ and a third ‘50 per cent real’ document for £1,400.
The seller wrote: ‘No ordinary person can see the difference unless you put the passports together side by side.
‘But passport control may recognise the fakes so you have the choice of paying more for an original passport or paying less and taking a risk. I could just tell you the £1,700 passport and you would say it is great, but I am giving you the choice.’
He promised to obtain a passport with a photo that looked like the undercover reporter or with the option of adding an image. It was available for collection in Istanbul, where the Mail had already bought a genuine UK passport stolen from a Milton Keynes businessman.
The Facebook seller also has a Twitter page with recently-updated British and Turkish phone numbers.
Another Facebook group page – called ‘asylum seekers cargo’ – says it is working to serve displaced Syrians but is also used as an illegal market place for passports.
Travel documents have been touted on the site for at least three years, with one post from a man called Hamada Azmir in 2015 offering a UK passport for £880. The group is run by a man calling himself Ahmad Alhssani, who lives in Istanbul but comes from Mayadine in Eastern Syria.
Some refugees in the EU also use the Facebook group to tout government-issued travel documents that allow free movement around most of the continent.
A man using the name Raaed Radwan, who claims to be a student in Germany but is originally from As Suwayda in Southern Syria, posted on the site to advertise his travel documents.
He wrote: ‘I have blue German passport and ID if anyone interested contact me.’
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