400 people a month use fake ID

Four hundred people a month are caught trying to enter the country at Heathrow using false documents, the Evening Standard can reveal.

They are mainly using passports stolen from British citizens.

The figure released today underlines the extent of the boom in identity fraud now costing the British economy £1.3billion a year.

Senior Scotland Yard officers say they are uncovering increasing evidence of criminals stealing passports and ID documents to provide fake identities to illegal immigrants.

On Friday the Evening Standard exposed how easy it is to obtain a doctored British passport and false Home Office papers, which were openly advertised for sale in the window of a west London newsagents shop.

Undercover reporters were able to buy an illegally-altered passport for £600. The East European gangs running the racket have escaped the notice of police and the Home Office so far simply by writing the adverts in Polish.

The Yard also revealed it is investigating more than 200 internet websites, which are catering to the surging demand for false identities.

The sites offer a do-it-yourself kit to build new IDs with blank documents such as birth certificates, NHS medical cards, National Insurance cards and stolen passports.

Assistant Commissioner Tarique

Ghaffur, director of specialist crime, said: "The scale of the identity fraud problem is very, very extensive, both in London and the rest of the UK.

"The availability of computer technology means that documents needed to create identities can be created or copied, and they are very difficult to detect by the naked eye."

Scotland Yard is now launching a joint intelligence-gathering team with the Passport Agency to investigate the extent of the problem and the criminals behind identity fraud.

Mr Ghaffur said ID fraud was now associated with a "significant" number of people entering the UK illegally, with 400 people a month being stopped at Heathrow, most of them claiming to be fleeing persecution.

He said: "The most common false document is the genuine passport with a substitute photo and a false stamp. We know there is an enormous amount of passports that are being stolen and never recovered. It runs into the hundreds of thousands."

The problem was highlighted earlier this year when pensioner Derek Bond was held in a South African prison for three weeks after the FBI confused him with a fraudster, Derek Sykes. It emerged that Sykes had assumed Mr Bond's identity.

Mr Ghaffur's comments come after a report by the Fraud Advisory Panel found that conmen were raiding people's dustbins for information to use in stealing identities.

The panel also revealed how the use of identities of dead people had risen from 2,500 in 2001 to 9,000 last year.

Mr Ghaffur said the Yard's Operation Maxim initiative had uncovered increasing evidence of how the theft of ID documents in the UK was being driven by a demand from people-trafficking gangs.

One Russian woman recently arrested in Hammersmith and suspected of involvement in trafficking

gangs was found in possession of 30 UK passports, $5,000 US and a number of stolen credit cards.

Police are also raiding "factories" where people produce forged or cloned credit cards. One computer seized recently contained details of 100,000 cards.

The loss to the credit card industry is estimated to be £370 million a year. Mr Ghaffur said: "I do not think this is a victimless crime. If, for instance, all these credit card companies are losing money, then I suspect they pass it on to the customer.

"Under Operation Maxim we will be pursuing people here and overseas using every method we can. Increasingly people are moving away from high-risk crimes into soft crimes such as this."

Police are also investigating how National Insurance numbers issued to asylum seekers when they arrived in the UK have been used to build false identities.