Identity cards, passports and driving licenses falsified but larger than life, almost impossible to detect except by rare experts and sold in large quantities for at least two years.
It is a chain of large-scale false documents that was dismantled this week by the border police services (PAF).
Eleven people, including a woman, were arrested Monday in Montpellier and Marseille and a twelfth, considered the head of the network, was arrested in La Verrière (Yvelines).
He is a 35-year-old Frenchman from Montpellier.
In each of these three towns, PAF police officers discovered forged document manufacturing pharmacies equipped with printers, scanners and laminators, supplied with all the necessary chemicals.
“This network was especially endowed with very high-level technical skills, blows a source close to the investigation.
The result was literally stunning ”.
Two years of investigations
The investigation began with the arrests on the Canebière in December 2018 of a holder of false documents and a person already known to the police for cases of concealment of false documents.
Two years of investigations followed by the mobile research brigades of Marseille and Montpellier.
Wiretapping, shadowing and physical surveillance then made it possible to expose a vast system based on the pick-pocketing of real documents.
Paid a few tens of euros to pickpockets by intermediaries, these documents were handed over to counterfeiters.
They were then trafficked and then sold to their new owners at prices between 1,000 and 3,000 euros, according to investigators.
Complete paraphernalia (identity card, passport, driving license) could be negotiated around 5,000 euros.
They flowed mainly in the city center of Marseille and the Paris region but also in a diffuse way over the whole territory (Lyon, Lille, Rennes and Metz in particular) and ended up in the hands of individuals in an irregular situation of all origins (Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia in particular).
In total, the investigators estimate that a good thousand forged documents could have been passed in this way for two years.
The twelve arrests carried out at the beginning of the week led to the deferral of eight people on Thursday.
They were indicted by an investigating judge from Montpellier for "helping an irregular stay in an organized band and providing false administrative documents".
