Immigration police uncovered 2,078 forged documents in the Czech Republic in 2024, up by almost 40% compared to the year before, officers from the immigration police and the National Centre for Document Control told Prima TV yesterday. The forged documents included passports, IDs, driving licences and various certificates. About 10% of the forgeries were high-quality fakes, difficult to distinguish from the genuine article.
“In 2024, we detected a total of 2,078 irregular or altered documents throughout the Czech Republic, which was a 39% year-on-year increase,” immigration police spokesman Josef Urban told Prima TV.
“Passports, travel documents and ID cards are most often intercepted at airports, while driving licences are mainly intercepted in the country’s interior,” said Cenek Soldan, head of the National Centre for Document Control.
According to Prima TV, the counterfeit documents detected by police officers included a permit to start construction, a medical decision on eligibility to work as a nanny, a vaccination document for a horse, and a document authorising the driving of an electric cart. 90% of the forged documents were said to be of poor quality, while 10% were more difficult to distinguish as fake.
A specialised unit of the National Centre for Document Control dedicated to detecting irregular documents started operating in December 2020. Its database of samples of genuine documents from the Czech Republic and other countries contains around 3,000 samples of passports and ID cards.
