“A nice little business” in British Passports?
A consignment of 3,000 “useless” blank biometric passports has been stolen on its way to British embassies throughout the world. Or at least, the Identity & Passport Service says they’re useless. A recent article in The Register shows why nothing could be further from the truth.
The passports were stolen from a courier vehicle in Manchester, UK while the driver stopped to buy a newspaper.
The article explains how even though the passports have high-tech chips installed, they can easily be used for a variety of fraudulent applications from opening bank accounts to getting jobs, as well as for travel in countries that do not yet have chip readers at border control points.
The final paragraph makes a chilling point:
… it’s still early in the relationship between forgers and biometric passports. One could perhaps envisage a future where businesses that regularly had to check passports (say, tourist hotels) could be ‘farmed’ by forgers for passport data, producing data banks of passports that hadn’t been stolen, but that could be cloned on demand - just pick somebody the right age and appearance. Put that together with a stock of blank biometric passports and you’ve got a nice little business there.
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