Thieves who got away with 3,000 blank passports and visas worth around £2.5 million targeted the van as it stopped at a newsagent's, police have said.Leaving aside the lax security, we've been there too often, who do you believe when it comes to the impact assesment?
The Governement line:
The passport service said the stolen documents could not be used by thieves because of their hi-tech embedded chip security features.Or Privacy International:
"The presence of so many potentially strong false identities would have a very high black-market value — perhaps in the range of £20m — and so a criminal enterprise would easily justify making the investment to hack the chip."Me? I'll go with the ingenuity of theives anytime. Security has always been an arms race between and no matter how secure we make something theives will always find a way round it, for a price. In this case £20m is certainly a good incentive.
1 comment:
.....but even if the chip isn't hacked, the blagged passports will be just excellent as far as those wonderful Money Laundering ID requirements are concerned. If I had a few million of dodgy money to launder, it would be very fine indeed to have some spare passports. Especially because the other bit - the proof of address - is about as easy to organise as it is for Government departments to lose personal data.
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