Bangkok - A Hub At Last !

[Buff-horns]

Welcome to Bangkok, the capital of forgery

By Sebastien Berger in Bangkok

(Filed: 26/08/2005)

The fringes of Bangkok's Little Arabia district offer more than coffee shops, shoe wholesalers and exotic cuisine.

The alleys where Middle Eastern families stroll with their womenfolk veiled are the hub of the world's fake passport trade, the authorities say. The most expensive items are genuine passports stolen and flown in from around the world, as well as those sold locally by their owners and customised for new users.

The alterations can be invisible to the naked eye, a western expert said.

Prices vary by nationality, length of validity and the visas contained in the document, as well as quality.

Southern European passports fetch about £900, said Col Chote Kuldiloke, the police officer in charge of fake passport investigations in Bangkok. The most sought-after - British, American and Australian passports - can fetch almost £2,000, he said.

They are popular because many of their would-be users speak English, he said. "If you have a French passport you have to speak French, right?"

This month an Algerian-born Briton, Mahieddine Daikh, was stopped at Bangkok airport on his way to Glasgow, via Amsterdam, allegedly with 138 fake passports in his hand luggage and another 314 in his checked-in backpack. It was one of the biggest such seizures ever.

The Spanish, French, Portuguese and Belgian documents, all false, were medium quality - good enough to open bank accounts but not to travel. They would sell for about £150 in the Thai capital.

Fake passports are linked with terrorism and money-laundering, although illegal immigration is the biggest driver of demand. The four countries whose papers Daikh carried are the most popular for fakers, according to Anthony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst with Jane's Information Group.

Their older versions have less sophisticated security features than northern European documents, and their likely users are ethnically similar, he said. "If you come from the Middle East and have a Spanish passport, you don't stand out as much as if you have a Norwegian one."

Fake passports are only one aspect of a huge international counterfeiting trade. Bangkok's position at the centre of the market is the result of good transport links and skilled craftsmen, according to Edward Kelly, a partner in the intellectual property division of Tilleke and Gibbins, the city's oldest law firm.

"Thais have a historically recognised ability to do handiwork," he said. "They are very skilled labour. Until recently the labour has been relatively cheap, and crime syndicates take advantage of what Thailand has to offer."

He specialises in commercial anti-counterfeiting work, and showed off two apparently identical Honda engines.

Only one was genuine. The other was a Chinese-made copy selling for about half the price of the real thing to buyers who get a low-quality product while Honda loses sales. "Anything that can be made by man is being copied," Mr Kelly said.

source: telegraph.co.uk