Thai immigration’s biometrics nabs 3 more fake passport holders

Thailand’s Immigration Bureau commander says the biometric system at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport caught three foreigners carrying fake passports during the month of September.

“In the first case, immigration police arrested an Iranian man, aged about 47 years, holding a French passport and travelling from Germany to Thailand. The biometric scanning showed only a 19% match between his face and passport photo, so we took him into custody,” said Pol Lt-General Sompong Chingduang.

The Nation reports that the man confessed to buying a fake passport in France for €520, in order to travel to Thailand and then on to Japan to seek employment. Sompong says the second person arrested was a Chinese man, in his fifties, and carrying a Burmese passport.

“The biometric scan identified that his passport’s Machine Readable Zone had been altered. The suspect later confessed that he bought the counterfeit passport from Rangoon for 25,000 Burmese kyat (500 baht) to travel to Thailand.”

The third arrest happened when a 28 year old Kenyan woman was detained while trying to leave Thailand. Sompong says she was trying to get away with having overstayed her visa.

“The biometric system alerted officials that she had overstayed in the country for two years. Her original visa allowed her to stay until September 15, 2017, and a fake stamp was used to give a new expiry date. She later confessed that she sent her passport to Kenya to have it altered at a cost of 10,000 baht.”

SOURCE: The Nation