Turns Out Jet Skis Make Traveling on Stolen Passports Even Easier

Although two passengers onboard the Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared Saturday boarded the flight with stolen passports, Malaysian and international police authorities maintain that the two Iranian men “are unlikely to be linked to terrorist groups,” according to The New York Times, after talking to the family of one of the men, as well as the man who purchased their tickets for the flight.

While it doesn’t shed light on what happened to the missing airliner, the men traveling with stolen passports highlight just how easy it is to travel with a stolen passport, in spite of Interpol’s efforts. And Iranians traveling to Europe through Asia, using passports that were stolen in Thailand, is more common than you’d think.

In 2002, Interpol created a database of stolen and lost passports, which has grown to more than 40 million documents. But according to the agency, last year people were able to board planes more than a billion times without having their passports tested against the database.

Only three countries “systematically screen” travelers against the database—the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirites. Interpol believes that aviation officials mistakenly think integrating the database would be too expensive, which the agency maintains is not the case—particularly when one considers the cost of not doing so. “It’s a nominal cost,” said one Interpol official told the Times. “We’re not talking millions here.”

The passports were Italian and Austrian and had been stolen in Thailand, which is also where the men’s tickets had been purchased. From an Interpol perspective, this isn’t terribly surprising. "Fake passports and identity fraud in general is a massive problem in Thailand," Thailand's Interpol director Apichart Suriboonya told Reuters.

The Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Christian Science Monitor that more than 60,000 passports were reported missing or stolen in Thailand between January 2012 and June 2013. Police said they get reports of up to 10 lost passports a month in the heavily-touristed province of Phuket. Sometimes, Australia’s former consul to the province said, crooked jet-ski rental places will take the passport as a deposit and claim damage to the jet ski. The passport is given up as lost or stolen if the tourist refuses to pay. Just selling your foreign passport and reporting it as stolen can fetch $200—enough for plenty of Singha.

Thousands of Iranians looking to travel to the West wait in visa-friendly Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, according to the Times. After stops in Beijing and Amsterdam, one man on the Malaysia Air flight was traveling to meet his mother in Germany, and the other had tickets to Copenhagen.

Interpol maintains that even though these two men almost definitely aren't terrorists, the agency doesn't want countries waiting until something terrible happens (again) to implement the database. Interpol's secretary general, Ronald Noble, blamed out-dated technology in Thailand for being unable to identify the fradulent IDs, but that's not the entire problem.

The police in Malaysia showed Reuters the Italian passport, and the passport still contained the picture of its original owner. Interpol can’t feel good about that—if even the simplest, already-in-place passport technology isn’t being used, what good is the database going to do?