Southeast Asia: officers trained on detecting fake identity documents

MANILA, Philippines –  With border points crucial to national and international security, 25 border control officers and forensic document examiners in Southeast Asia have been trained in the latest security document examination techniques.

As part of their newly-launched collaboration, INTERPOL’s Counterfeit Currency and Security Documents unit partnered with Onfido to deliver the three-day (12 - 14 March) training course benefiting officers from Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam. Training was provided by instructors from  INTERPOL, Onfido and the US Department of State.

The course trained participants on the latest security features embedded in official government identity documents and provided practical exercises for identifying fraudulent documents including counterfeits, forgeries, and fraudulently-obtained documents.

The use of INTERPOL global policing capabilities was also high on the agenda, including:

• its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database, which currently holds some 80 million records on a range of documents such as passports, identity cards, and visa stamps
• Edison (Electronic Documentation and Information System on Investigation Networks), which provides examples of genuine travel documents, in order to help identify fakes
• the Digital INTERPOL Alert Library – Document (Dial-Doc), which allows countries to issue global alerts based on newly detected forms of document counterfeiting.

In his opening remarks, Deputy Executive Director of the Philippines Police Pelagio U. Samson underlined the importance of training to enhance national capacity in addressing counterfeiting, identity and identity-related crimes.

Daniela Djidrovska, Coordinator of INTERPOL’s Counterfeit Currency and Security Documents unit, highlighted the benefits of working with private sector partners to fight counterfeit documents: “The first joint INTERPOL-Onfido training showcases the standardized procedures for security documents examination while comparing and contrasting with the remote identity verification using images of photo-based identity documents.”

Michael Van Gestel, who leads Onfido’s global document fraud team, underlined the importance of teaming up with INTERPOL: “As criminals get more sophisticated in designing new attack vectors, there has never been a more important time to unify our knowledge of both 3D and 2D document authentication and share this in a unique training course.”

The three-day training also featured a number of incident case studies as well as country presentations.