Some 400 fake identification documents were confiscated by border control officers over the past two years as the authorities clamp down on irregular movements in and out of the country, Times of Malta has learnt.
A police breakdown of the documents produced by travellers at Malta International Airport and sea passenger terminal shows that more than half of the fake documents were passports.
A border control officer who spoke to this newspaper on condition of anonymity said he had encountered several forged documents in his long service at Luqa airport. These, he said, were getting harder to spot as forgers honed their techniques.
“The forgeries are getting better and better. It’s often very hard to spot a fake. Luckily, we know what to look for. There are tell-tale signs such as the quality of paper and the printing,” he said, adding that the introduction of biometric passports had made the forgers’ job much harder.
A closer look at the police figures shows that border control officers had to be on the lookout for more than just fake passports.
Some 96 fake identify cards and 63 residency permits were confiscated since 2013.
Sometimes, fake rubber stamps are used on legitimate documents instead of falsifying entire passports. Officers found 11 fake visa markings on passports that belonged to people trying to enter or leave the island.
Asked who they believed were forging the documents found in Malta, a police spokesman said it was difficult to determine because in most if not all cases the job was believed to have been done abroad.
The police are on the lookout for a Serbian man who is charging foreigners €150 to put falsified rubber stamps on their passport. The search began earlier this month after three men found with fake rubber stamps said they had paid the same mystery man.
Many eastern Europeans do not require a visa to enter Malta but if they planned to stay for more than three months they would have to leave and then re-enter the country so their travel document/passport could be rubber stamped by the immigration authorities. The fake rubber stamp racket saves them the hassle and the expense of having to travel every quarter.
Two men, one from Serbia and the other from Macedonia, were each given a suspended jail term last month after they admitted to making use of forged entry and exit rubber stamps on their passports.
The boarder control officer who spoke to this newspaper said this sort of practice was not uncommon and he knew what to look for when it came to fake rubber stamps.
The forgeries are getting better and better. It’s often very hard to spot a fake
A large number of those attempting to leave the country using fake documents, he added, were sub-Saharan migrants hoping to continue their clandestine journey to continental Europe.
One such migrant, a 31-year-old Malian, was jailed for two years earlier this year after he was caught trying to leave the country using a false Italian passport and a forged Italian residency permit. He claimed to have paid an Italian forger €2,000 for the documents.
Italian forgeries made up the bulk of the fake documents discovered with about 194 false Italian passports and permits being spotted in the period under review. About 70 have already been found this year. Twenty eight fake Maltese documents were also found.
Several fake Maltese passports had been among a large quantity of forgeries seized by the police in Bangkok back in 2008.
The documents were allegedly sold to a group of Thai and Burmese middlemen who then sold them to gangs engaged in prostitution, terrorism and smuggling across Asia, the Bangkok police had said.