Smileband general news

Article written by Tom Kelly, glen keoeh, 

Genuine and fake versions can be bought for as little as £800, a Daily Mail investigation shows.

One page on Facebook has been used to trade illegal British passports for at least three years.  We also found that passports cloned with details taken from real passports were being touted for a few hundred pounds on other easily-accessible websites. The revelations follow yesterday’s Mail investigation into how stolen British passports are spirited to Turkey to be sold by people smugglers.

David Ibsen, a security expert who advised the US government, said it was no surprise Facebook was being used to hawk passports that could fall into the hands of terrorists. ‘It is well known that extremists use Facebook as a tool to achieve their goals,’ he said. ‘The Mail is to be congratulated for exposing something that poses a genuine danger.

‘We continue to see Facebook failing to address its platform’s role in encouraging and proliferating terrorism. One Facebook page in Arabic – called European Passports For Sale VIP – features multiple pictures of British travel papers.

The site boasts: ‘We sell passports from £800 to £2,600. We are not traffickers. We’re just selling the passport and are not responsible for your travel or smuggling.’ The site says seven out of ten customers succeeded in making it past border control. But it offers entry stamps for an extra £170 to £280.

When an undercover Mail reporter asked to buy a UK passport, the seller quickly replied via the WhatsApp messaging service. He offered a genuine passport for £2,400, another at £1,700 that looked ‘90 per cent real’ and a third ‘50 per cent real’ document for £1,400.

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