Comes on the heels of Interpol’s concerns regarding stolen travel documents.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: At least 70 passports have been stolen from the San Francisco office of BLS International, prompting the city’s Indian Embassy to contact federal authorities and cancel the missing documentation.
BLS International is a private company that processes the passport and visa paperwork for Indian Embassies and Consulates around the country. The theft of the passports is currently being investigated by the San Francisco Police Department, but there is no word yet on any suspects of motives in the robbery.
The theft occurred during the weekend of November 29, 2013. Police were notified on December 2, and discovered that, in addition to the passports, several checks and cash had been stolen from a locked safe kept at the BLS International office. Initial estimates were as low as eight passports missing, but now the number has skyrocketed to no less than 70.
Stolen passports are often used as a means to illegally board a plane, although since the passports in question have been cancelled, it would be impossible for whoever has them to use any of them. But cancelled passports have been a pressing concern of late, because of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight that had at least two passengers on-board with stolen documentation.
The plane, which has now been missing for four days, went off-the-grid somewhere over the water between Kuala Lampur and Beijing. Now, two of the passengers on the plane are known to have gained entry by using stolen passports, and reports indicate that both of those men may have been Iranian citizens. Investigators, however, are saying that terrorism in this instance was unlikely.
Passport documentation is managed by Interpol, which keeps a database of all missing, stolen, or lost passport documentation. Alarmingly, however, only three nations regularly check their own databases against the master list kept by Interpol: the US, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In fact, the countries search through this database annually 250 million times, 120 million times, and 50 million times, respectively.
Interpol is now testing a better methodology to catch potential fraudsters by giving two airlines direct access to its missing passport database. One of the reasons cited for the low checking of Interpol’s database is that the service requires a fee for each check conducted, which takes away the incentive to check several million times per year.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com