Fraudulent Passport Price List

This is a list (URL acquired from spam) of prices for fraudulent (but perhaps “genuine” in terms of the materials used, I don’t know) passports, driving licenses and ID cards. It is a fascinating insight into the relative security of the identification systems of a number of countries. Of course, the prices may also factor in the economic value of the passport, but it’s interesting that a Canadian passport is more expensive than a US one. That probably reflects difficulty of obtaining the passport rather than the greater desirability of Canada over the US. (Sorry, Canadians, I know you’d disagree! Still, you can be happy at the competence and lack of corruption in your passport service.)

One interesting thing to note is that one of the joint lowest-price countries, Latvia (€900), is a member of the EU. A Latvian passport allows you to live and work in any EU country, even Germany, which has the most expensive passports (€5200). The right to live anywhere in the EU – yours for only €900…

Also interesting is to sort by passport price and look if the other prices follow the same curve. A discrepancy may indicate particularly weak or strong security. So Russian ID cards are cheaper than one might expect, whereas Belgian ones are more expensive. Austrian and Belgian driver’s licenses also seem to be particularly hard to forge, but the prize there goes to the UK, which has the top-priced spot (€2000). I wonder if that’s related to the fact that the UK doesn’t have ID cards, so the driver’s license often functions as one?

Here is the data in spreadsheet form (ODS), so you can sort and analyse, and just in case the original page disappears…

6 thoughts on “Fraudulent Passport Price List

  1. I am skeptical about the prices correlating with how hard things are to forge – because the pink plastic credit-card-sized driver licenses that you get in the Netherlands and the UK are, as best I could tell, identical in terms of security features (apart from the obvious lettering differences in stating the country of issue and so forth), whereas the Dutch ones are 40% cheaper.

    I’m not aware of the DVLA still giving out the non-plastic variety (although they could still be valid, and so I suppose there might be a market for forgeries, but only if those were easier rather than harder than the plastic ones…).

  2. A good point… but if the licenses are obtained with the help of an insider, then it could just be that Dutch people can be bought cheaper than British people ;-P (Hey, sell at a lower price, make it up on the volume…)

  3. For the US at least, there’s a rather cheaper way to go, /if/ you’re here. The short version is, you get an actual real birth certificate for someone other than yourself (which you can do because they’re public record), then you use that to apply for a real social security card, and you take those two items (which don’t feature your photo or anything that would really clue anyone in to whether you’re the same person or not, other than gender and age) to the BMV, pass the driving test, pay the normal fee, and get a real driver’s license. Then you go and apply for a passport in the usual way, just like anybody planning a trip to Niagara Falls would do.

  4. is this for real,no one respond on my request on that site when I asked to bay latvian passport

  5. I have no information on whether it’s for real or not, but it’s probably not an awesome idea to comment in a public forum that you were soliciting help in carrying out criminal acts…

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