Dozens dupe Jet Airways, enter Canada

Transport Canada officials recently warned India's largest privately owned commercial airline it would be barred from operating flights to Canada if its reservation agents didn't do a better job detecting passengers travelling on bogus passports.
Agents for Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Canada Border Service Agency have discovered dozens of Jet Airways passengers arriving at Toronto's Pearson International Airport with fake travel documents in recent months, five sources familiar with the matter told the Star.
After pressure from Canadian officials, Jet has reassigned responsibility for passenger security checks to its security division from its customer service department.
"We want to root out this menace as much as anyone," said Ragini Chopra, a Jet spokesperson.
In most cases, a person with an extensive international travel history applied for and received a legitimate Canadian visa.
The photo page of their Indian passport was then replaced with a doctored one and used by a different person.
It's unclear how many people were involved in the scam, but Canadian immigration officials believe several dozen have slipped into the country with the fake Indian passports in the past year.
"In some cases, the forgeries were extremely professional," said Raja Segran, Jet's vice-president for European operations.
"In one case we weren't sure about one passport and asked a professional to look at it in Brussels. He said it looked genuine and the passenger carried on to Toronto, where it turned out that the passport was a forgery."
Starting this week, Jet's employees in Brussels will receive training to ferret out fake documents, Segran said. Jet flights to Canada lay over in Belgium, with daily departures to Toronto.
Passengers involved in the scam have applied for refugee status after their arrival in Toronto, and remain in Canada.
Under Canadian immigration law, most people who arrive at a port of entry are entitled to make a claim for refugee status.
Investigators involved in rooting out the scam said reservations for Canadian hotels were made over the Internet and a printout was produced to show border agents in Toronto.
Border agents detected the first fake Indian passport they believe was connected to the scheme in February 2008.
After a lull of activity, more fake passports began to show up in September and continued through December.
Canadian officials say the fraud was crude enough that Jet reservation agents should have detected it.
Legitimate Indian passports feature a line in microprinting that reads "Indian Passport Control" across the photo page.
On some of the doctored passports, the line was little more than a smudge.Privacy laws have also made it hard to track scam organizers through credit cards.
03/02/09 Rick Westhead/Toronto Star, Canada

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Categories: Airports Feb 2009, Foreign Feb 2009, Jet Airways Feb 2009