Authorities in France have arrested and charged eight individuals, including two police officers, believed to have been a part of an elaborate forgery scheme that helped hundreds of illegal migrants obtain official French residence permits.
After having operated for roughly two years, the tight-knit network’s scheme was finally brought to an end on Monday, June 5th when investigators from the Sub-Directorate for Combating Irregular Migration (SDLII) raided numerous residences and locations relevant to the case, arresting the suspects and seizing fake identity documents, state-of-the-art laser printers, loads of cash, computers, and other tools of the trade, the French news outlet TF1 INFO reports.
The arrests, which took place throughout the Paris region, came following a year-long investigation by a specialized police unit. Upon facing a judge, the arrestees, seven men and women aged 21-55, were charged with use of forgery in writing, forgery and use of forgery in an administrative document, and aiding the irregular entry and stay of foreigners on French territory.
In exchange for an average sum of €15,000 in cash, illegal immigrants were given a kit that provided them everything they needed to “access the right to reside in France, completely illegally,” as the French news outlet put it. The network provided them with false identity documents—passports, identity cards, driver’s licenses, payslips, tax notices, medical prescriptions, and employment contracts—from various European countries whose official documents are easier to reproduce than those made in France.
An official familiar with the case told the news outlet that the criminal network would often falsify documents from Eastern European countries since they attract less attention from the authorities which tend to place more “restrictive processes on African or Middle Eastern nationals.”
The system, therefore, allowed hundreds of illegal migrants to pass themselves off as EU nationals who were applying for French residency. By fraudulently proving that they were EU nationals that had worked in France recently, they could then go on to obtain a real five-year residence permit, which gives them the same rights as naturalized citizens and which can be automatically renewed for another five years.
The scheme to produce forged documents was done with a “degree of sophistication which has rarely been seen before in France,” someone close to the case told the newspaper. An official working at the Paris police headquarters referred to the system implemented by the network as “a particularly ingenious scheme.”
The two police officers, described as cornerstones of the operation, worked at the prefectures of Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise), Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), and Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) and are said to have validated the falsified documents by computer.
Of the eight suspects who have been charged, five remain in police custody while the others have been placed under judicial supervision.
