I know about the Austrian who reported his passport stolen two years ago.
I know about the Italian who reported his stolen last August.
What is supposed to happen? I suppose the issuing country puts out a bulletin saying that Italian passport # 12345678 to Luigi Maldagi (I forget his real name) was stolen.
Are the airport ticket agents supposed to run a background check on every passenger's passport? That seems too much?
What, then?
I read a report last night that said the stolen passports were on the Interpol databank that can be supplied to any country’s security services if that country would ask for the info. The report also stated that many countries do not bother obtaining the info from Interpol & therefore don’t bother monitoring the validity of the passports presented. Nice, huh?
The poster above who said airport security is a joke hit the nail on the head. Seems its not just a problem limited to the USA and our TSA agency of Tools Standing Around.
The red flag should have gone up at the immigration checkpoint, when the departure immigration officer scanned the barcode on the passport. Could be that the immigration officer was greased, or part of the caper. The officers who let them pass have been detained.
A question for any EU passport holders: does the EU not issue the biometric passports yet? Our Indonesian passports have fingerprints and iris scans electronically embedded in them, and the photo of the holder cannot be changed. It is not likely that anybody from the neighbourhood would use these documents with Italian and German names. Perhaps the users of these passports were middle eastern creeps who could pass for Europeans.
Is it conceivable that the security database could be hacked, and the flags removed?
“Are the airport ticket agents supposed to run a background check on every passenger’s passport? That seems too much?”
At a time in history during which the NSA could probably tell you what each of us bought at the grocery store yesterday, one would think that the stolen passports could be put into each airlines’ computer reservation system fairly quickly and easily and that the system would automatically flag those when there’s an attempt to use them.
"Are the airport ticket agents supposed to run a background check on every passenger's passport? That seems too much?"-IzzyDunne
Sorry for being repetitive . . .
via Calcutta News: Travel by passengers with stolen identities can be prevented
. . .but apparently WASN'T
Since our government TSA considers this appropriate and timely,
it hardly seems inefficient to insist ticket agents make routine use of the
Technology and a database listing all passports stolen in the world maintained by Interpol
As computerized as most things are you would think if the number from a stolen passport is entered for any reason- especially to buy airline tickets it would trigger a flag- to be rejected or checked further...