The Passport Story

Focus put up an interesting eight-line story this morning.

It's come to light within the German government....probably via the BND (the German intelligence service)....that there are around 11,100 Syrian blank passports which disappeared from secure facilities in Syria, and probably held by ISIS thugs.

The serial numbered passports?  Well, that's the other curious thing....they know the serials involved and so when some guy shows up and tries to enter the country....some red-flag will occur.

I sat and pondered over the story.

Basically.....no one can say precisely that ISIS holds the 11,100 passports.  It could be three or four ISIS connected guys wandered into a situation....realized here were the blank passports, and walked out the backdoor with them without saying much to the ISIS organization itself.  Value on the street?  Generally, if you can come up with a a legit passport....blank....for a black-market operation....it'd probably be worth 2,000 Euro easily.  Yeah....roughly 22-million Euro of value.  Just on selling to a middle-guy who'd handle the whole business of distribution....you could probably ask for 5-million Euro and get it.

So in the midst of this Focus article, there's this other odd piece to the story.  BamF...the agency that Germany uses to manage incoming refugees and migrants....admits that since 2015, there's been almost 19,000 fraudulent passports noted.  What happened to the 19,000 individuals?  Unknown.  Journalists didn't apparently ask that question.

You would think that a discovery like this....would mean that a cop comes into the room and detains you in some cell until you can establish your precise identity.  My gut feeling is that most were simply given a slip of paper for an appointment to come back in a week with a better story.

Why the hype over Syrian passports?  Well...if you go back to 2015, BamF kinda started letting people to know that Syrians and Iraqis had a higher chance of being accepted for the visa....Afghans and Tunisians....much less so (Tunisians tend to run around 10-to-15 percent on visa application acceptance).  If you tried to sell a fake or fraudulent Tunisian passport?  It's probably worth 50 Euro max....it gets you nowhere in the German process.

The problem here now with these stolen 11,100 passports?  With the serial numbers widely known....their value goes suddenly down from 22 million dollars....to maybe being worthless.