IMMIGRATION DEPT BUSTS DOCUMENT-FORGING SYNDICATE
Bangladeshi family behind the operation was raking in RM30,000 a month
ABANGLADESHI family of 15 earned a hefty RM30,000 a month by supplying forged documents to their countrymen for the past one year.
They were believed to have been forging travel and work documents for “clients” who wished to stay longer in the country and also for those who wanted to work in a different job sector.
Intelligence received by the Immigration Department was that the services of the “family syndicate”, comprising a married couple and their relatives, were so highly sought-after that they had clients nationwide.
Immigration director-general Datuk Seri Mustafar Ali said the enforcement team, which raided the family’s rented house in Serdang and arrested them on Tuesday, found dozens of forged documents for Bangladeshis based in various parts of the country.
“Preliminary investigations showed that this syndicate was producing about 30 to 40 fake cards a day. They had been active for a year,” he said at the Home Ministry Complex here yesterday.
He said Immigration Department intelligence officers had been monitoring the family, aged between 20 and 40, for three weeks before raiding their house.
“They ran another business selling handphones and reload cards at several booths in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. We found out that this business was only to mask their real operations. Their clients would go to the booths to apply for fake documents and they used the house to process them.”
It is learnt that the family had entered the country using travel passes or work permits, then stayed on illegally using forged documents.
The enforcement team seized a Toyota Camry worth RM40,000, about RM8,000 worth of equipment used to forge documents, RM6,977 cash and stacks of fake documents.
These included Enforcement Cards (E-Kad), Construction Industry Development Board cards, Temporary Employment Visit passes and passports.
Earlier yesterday, one of the syndicate members was brought in to demonstrate to the media how he forged a passport using a graphics application on a desktop computer.
The process took just a few minutes.
“At a glance, the documents look legitimate. Only if you look at it closely do you become aware of the differences in details, such as the font size,” said Mustafar.
He said the department believed that there were other syndicates which supplied fake documents to immigrants in the country, adding that it would intensify operations to hunt down these syndicates.