Criminal gangs targeting boozed-up Brits in Magaluf to steal their passports to flog to ISIS
Warning as professional hustler reveals simple scams used by crooks to nick passports
CRIMINAL gangs are targeting boozed-up Brits in holiday hotspots like Magaluf so they can nick their passports and flog them to terror group ISIS.
UK passports are highly prized because they allow bearers to breeze through borders unchecked.
Crooks operating in resorts popular with British tourists see young people on holiday for the first time as easy pickings.
Villains try to match photographs on the passports with images of people waiting to receive a stolen travel document.
And a passport that closely resembles a would-be recipient can fetch up to £1,000.
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The warning comes as the Foreign Office released a shocking video of the ways hustlers swipe passports from under the noses of unsuspecting victims.
Magician James Freedman, star of telly show The Real Hustle, reveals scams including posing as a policeman, distracting the victim with a staged spillage and simply swiping a passport from a hotel check-in desk.
UK travellers are most at risk in Spain with 5,132 British passports going missing in the year to March 2015, government figures show.
That is followed by 1,880 thefts in the USA, 1,487 in France, 1,268 in Italy and 1,043 in Australia.
In total 20,663 British passports were lost or stolen between April 2014 and March last year.
Eva Velasquez, of the Identity Theft Centre, says UK passports stolen abroad ended up in the hands of terror groups like ISIS.
She said: “The tourists have their guard down as they are on vacation and they have to carry these documents.
"They are targets. Identity theft is a very lucrative crime.
“We treat our cash, credit cards and jewellery as valuables and protect them.
We don’t have the same mindset about personal identifying information and we need to have that shift – a passport is just as valuable if not more so."
Velasquez said “it stands to reason” that groups like ISIS are being sold these documents as thieves do not care who they sell them to.
She said British passports are attractive targets as the owners are often well travelled and travel between nations easily.
She said: “Your passport has a history of your activities, stamps for where you have been.
“They look at it and see a passport where the person has travelled around the world they think: ‘I can do just about anything.’
“We talk to people regularly whose identity has been used in the committing of a crime.
“Sometimes they are travelling and they get put on a no fly list or there is an alert for criminal activity that has nothing to do with them because other people have used their identity.
“Criminal gangs don’t know and don’t care who they sell this stolen information to.”
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