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67 FBI L. Enforcement Bull. 9 (1998)
Passport Fraud: Protecting U.S. Passport Integrity

handle is hein.journals/fbileb67 and id is 208 raw text is: Photo 0 PhotoDisc A foreign national and organized crime boss residing in the United States eludes conviction on other crimes for several years but is arrested and convicted for altering U.S. passports.t A college professor, and known pedophile, is apprehended attempting to bring a 15-year-old Central American youth into the United States using a false U.S. passport. After obtaining a U.S. passport under an assumed identity, a Jamaican drug dealer is located and arrested in Durham, North Carolina. In Gaithersburg, Maryland, a woman is arrested on several counts of passport fraud, crimes which had facilitated an alien- smuggling operation.' Because it attests to the iden- tity and citizenship of the bearer and provides safe passage, a U.S. passport remains es- sential to international travel, Un- fortunately, as these cases illustrate, a significant percentage of pass- ports are obtained by fraudulent ap- plication, alteration, or counterfeit- ing. To combat this problem, the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) of the U.S. Department of State em- ploys approximately 750 special agents in 22 offices across the United States and in more than 133 American embassies and consulates around the world. In conjunction with other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, DSS works to identify and arrest the growing number of perpetrators of these crimes. The Passport: Past and Present The Old Testament of the Bible contains one of the first recorded references of the use of a passport. King Artaxerxes of Persia gave documents to his servant Nehemiah in 455 B.C.. ensuring his safe pas- sage from Persia to Jerusalem. Today s passports convey the same benefits to the bearer, but with more than 170 countries in the world, they encompass a wide variety of designs, features, and styles. The typical construction consists of a hard cover embossed with the country's seal or coat of arms. In- side, several blank pages stitched to the binding provide space for visas and cachet stamps, The most impor- tant identifying data of the docu- ment is contained on the bio- graphical page, which normally July 1998 / 9