I've warned many times that you should avoid any "instant citizenship and passport" program that doesn't have a solid basis in law.
Someone selling you a passport from a country where there's no provision in the law for the issuance of such documents is either offering documents that are stolen, counterfeited, or issued illegally.
In all such cases, the resulting passports are subject to cancellation and confiscation at any time. Worse, the persons using them could face fines and even imprisonment for possession of illegal travel documents.
Currently, there are only three countries in the world that have provisions in their domestic law for "economic citizenship:" the Commonwealth of Dominica, the Federation of St. Kitts & Nevis, and Austria. (And of these three, Austria is no longer a realistic alternative, because its program has been effectively suspended.)
Unfortunately, these facts haven't stopped dozens of Internet promoters from selling fraudulent passports. I've written about them before, but just yesterday, a colleague forwarded a Web page where passports from two unnamed countries in the European Union were being sold for prices of US$9,900 and US$19,800, respectively.
One clue that these passports are obviously fraudulent comes in the promotional text, in which it is claimed that the price of a travel document from either of these EU countries includes an optional birth certificate.
Naturally, the promoter of these documents stipulates that they are 100% genuine documents that haven't been stolen. Well, of course.
That's only a small sampling of the passports available from this source. Passports from Guyana, Suriname, Nicaragua, and even diplomatic passports are also available—again, all supposedly 100% genuine documents that haven't been stolen.
I can only hope that the appropriate law enforcement agencies in the countries in which these documents are being offered shut down this online passport mill. Otherwise, buyers of the fraudulent documents it's offering could face some very serious consequences if discovered to have them in their possession.
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Nestmann
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