Stolen passports - why?
 

Reading many musings from tourists, there is a lot of reports of passports being stolen from people.

Why? Why would anyone steal a passport? Especially new biometric ones or even plain old ones with picture printed on the page?

To apply for loans, commit fraud and travel illegally.

Black market passports are worth a lot of $

anyone traveling on the forged, new biometric passport of someone else is just asking for trouble......how do they expect to clear immigration at origin/destination is just beyond me.......there are so many "document checks" at the gate for UK/Canada/USA that it's impossible to think anyone will get through..

That's what I meant. We're not using the old passports where photo was a separate piece, chips in them... why do they even bother at this point?

ya stolen passports should be useless these days. Even most of the visas issued these days have photos on them too...so it's pointless unless the person really resembles the passport holder and can fool the id/gate checkers

Passports can be manipulated - even biometric ones. There's money to be made with forged documents, so there are professionals in this business. The passports get better, the forgers get better.

A lot of land borders and less developed countries do not have biometric checkers.

I suppose you might not need to fool the biometric checkers. If you can get onto a flight to a country where you are planning to claim asylum it won't necessarily matter that the passport won't work when you get there

Correct. There are many places you can travel with a manipulated biometric passport and the biometrics never get verified.

I've even heard of foreigners here in Bangkok selling their own passports to the black market guys and then going to their embassy to get a new passport. Rinse and repeat.

(Cash for selling new biometric EU passport) >> (cost of getting a new passport)

Interesting business.

Sometimes you don't even need to steal the passport for identity fraud, an NFC reader can read the chip if close enough and that gets you all the data, photo and everything.

This.

Exactly this.

I think too a lot of people don't really look the same after 10 years, the validity of many western countries' passports. Someone who looks similar could pass muster in many places. Hell, I've crossed a number of borders where they either don't look or barely look at my photo, both in first and third world countries.

In airports, with airline employees, I rarely notice them comparing the picture, usually it's verifying names match to the boarding pass. The one place I have noticed them doing a photo comparison about 100% of the time is Chinese immigration.

The security and immigration checks at KUL did not prevent people with false passport boarding flight MH 370 to PEK.

Passports are generally recognized as a form of ID, so you can do a LOT within one country with a stolen passport. While it may be harder (though CLEARLY not impossible) to cross borders with a stolen passport, it can be very useful for various reasons (e.g. someone who is on the run and does not want to get caught, open a bank account, etc.) LOTS of fraud happens today due to stolen passports.