AS TRAVEL documents get harder to fake, a different type of passport fraud has surfaced in Singapore.

It involves foreigners who come to work here without legal papers and then want to get out of the country without the long arm of the law catching up with them.

The racket involves a would-be illegal immigrant, who enters the country on his own passport, and then quickly sells it to someone else who can use it to leave the country.

The going rate is $200 to $400, with a commission going to a middleman.

When it is time to leave for home, he pays for a passport himself from another newly arrived countryman, makes himself up to look like the passport photograph, and then uses it to get through the checkpoints.

If he succeeds, he would have been able to work and live here illegally for an amount of time.

Passport cheats are resorting to posing as genuine passport holders now that new and high-tech immigration documents have got much harder to forge, said Superintendent Sri Ramulunaidu, head of investigations at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA).

'So they might as well take a chance...unless the passport is very well done, which is very expensive,' he said.

There are other methods being tried to con the border authorities as well, like substituting the photograph in the passport for one's own. Another is to replace the biodata pages of genuine passports with forged ones.

In total, ICA caught some 3,600 passport fraudsters last year, about 1,000 more than in 2006.

Read the full story in Monday's edition of The Straits Times.