Students top visa fraud cases

Seventy-five percent of people arrested in connection with visa fraud and forgery are reported to be university students.

They are usually found to have presented fictitious bank statements, introductory letters, birth certificates and letterheads among other documents.

Assistant Commissioner of Police, K.K Amoah in charge of the Commercial Crime Unit of the Police Criminal Investigations Department made this known when he spoke on “Visa and Passport Fraud - Search for Solutions” at a two day workshop on crime combating at Dodowa.

The workshop was organised by the Ghana Journalists Association in collaboration with the Ghana Police Service and the British High Commission in Accra.

Mr Amoah said that in some cases, the students were found to have directly or indirectly provided such forged documents to suspects.

He said often in their interrogation, it was realised that the culprits had the desire to travel or defraud innocent people for money.

Between August 2004 and 2006, a total of 1,215 people were arrested in connection with visa racketeering, fraud and forgery and ACP Amoah said most often it was travel agents who acted as visa contractors and agents, hiding behind their tourism operations to dupe people.

He described the situation as disturbing which needed to be brought to a halt before it got out of hand.

Presenting a paper on “Statistics on Fraud and Narcotics”, Alphones Adu Amankwah, head of the Organised Crime Unit of the Police CID, said even though the police and other organizations were working tirelessly to frustrate the activities of criminals, statistics over the past six years showed undulating trends.

“Fraud is not a new phenomenon but it is becoming a daily experience in inter-personal relationship”.

He mentioned Advance Fee Fraud also called 419 which is being facilitated by the use of modern communications equipment like the internet, fax and phone calls to lure victims.

In 2006, he said 14,137 fraud cases were registered as against 12,561 and 14,049 recorded in 2005 and 2004 respectively.

The acting Director of Passports, Sylvester Packer-Allotey expressed concern about the proliferation of fake passports in the system noting that last week alone, 22 Ghanaian passports were seized in Milan in Italy.

Source: The Ghanaian Times