With the banks raising concerns with the Government over increasing numbers of fake foreign passports it is even more important to verify these important identification documents at source. Fraud costs the UK economy an estimated £20bn a year and whilst it is extremely difficult to fake a UK passport, the banks say they cannot rely on foreign embassies to verify these documents, including an increasing number of fake passports from the new EU member states. The BBC found how easy it was to find offers of forged documents online. With just a couple of clicks of a mouse anyone can find fake driving licences, National Insurance numbers and passports from the UK and abroad for sale over the internet. A fake Estonian passport or UK driving licence with details provided by a buyer appeared to be on offer for £120.
Richard Connelly of Agenda Security Services said
“This report does not come as a surprise and shows the importance of robust pre-employment screening checks and not taking any official looking documents at face value. With the risks of recruiting a fraudster or incurring serious fines for employing an illegal worker it is simply common sense to ensure that document checks are rigorous”.
The Immigration and Passport service runs its own passport validation service which has checked a 100,000 UK passports in the last two years. Of these, 1,000 fraudulent passports were detected, saving £4m in prevented fraud. But there is no equivalent service for foreign passports. For more information on Agenda’s document checking services please contact info@agenda-security.co.uk
Source BBC News, 28th July 2009
