Marechaussee has seen as much identity fraud last year as before the pandemic

The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee intercepted 1,465 forged travel, residence and identity documents at the Dutch border last year, nearly 10 per cent more than in 2020. Despite the drop in travel, the numbers are roughly the same as the years before the coronavirus pandemic. Marechaussee confirms on Saturday after reporting from telegraph†

Border frauds have mainly occurred with passports and ID cards. According to Marechaussee, this usually happened with a completely fake document. In addition, passports are often forged by inserting a fake personal details page into an original passport.

The forged documents were found mainly at the airports. At Schiphol there were 947 documents intercepted and at Eindhoven Airport 99. A total of 12 forged documents were intercepted at other airports.

In addition, a significant increase was observed last year in the number of forged documents at Dutch application centers for asylum seekers, the Marechaussee newspaper reported. In 2020, there were 173 incidents with a total of 202 forged documents and last year there were 320 cases and 360 forged documents. Most of the scammers come from Syria (132). In addition, 48 Yemenis and 42 Turks were arrested.

According to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), 24,740 asylum seekers submitted their first asylum applications in 2021, the largest number since 2015. This is much more than in 2020, when 13,720 applications were received. At the time, this was due to international travel restrictions and border closures, in part due to the coronavirus.