An attorney in my office recently represented in US federal court a Chinese national who got caught flying on a US domestic flight with a pretty good quality counterfeit Chinese passport. He had entered the US on a genuine passport and overstayed his visa letting his passport expire. He obtained the new document which purported to be current.

The forger did an acceptable job of forging the security laminate on the license, had done a pretty good job of sharpening up all the pages so none of the text or art work was blurry, used a pretty good paper, and did a nice job on the board covers. The various passport stamps and visas that were on the stamp pages were pretty good quality but on careful examination you could tell that the Malaysian "visa" had been printed on an inkjet printer. The paper did not illuminate correctly under black light and a TSA agent at DTW which doesn't have a special international terminal caught it. I wouldn't have given them that much credit.

If you are curious how I knew so much, I covered the probable cause hearing for the attorney who was out of town and chatted with the CBP document examiner who did the second tier examination of the document. US-CBP has a very high end scanner which compares the document with known exemplars of genuine, counterfeit, and altered passports from virtually every country (and other passport issuing entities such as the UN Refugee agency).

Anyway, I thought I'd share the story with as much detail as I could provide. While I have a number of issues with the TSA, I thought I would give this particular agent his "due."