Damascus-SANA
The Ministry of Interior seeks to work according to several measures to combat the crimes of counterfeiting and forgery of currencies, official documents and educational certificates, which have spread due to the circumstances and repercussions of the terrorist war on Syria.
Head of the Anti-Counterfeiting, Forgery and Cash Smuggling Branch in Criminal Security, Colonel Waseem Maarouf Bayn, told SANA that the number of these crimes witnessed a noticeable decline after 2018 as a result of the liberation of most areas from armed terrorist organizations and the return of security and stability to them after they had spread and increased significantly since the beginning of the war following The chaos that occurred in the presence of terrorists, pointing out that these crimes were rare before the war on Syria.
The number of forged certificates for all educational levels (university, secondary, preparatory, and educational sequence stages) amounted to about 20,000 documents since the beginning of the terrorist war on Syria until 2018, according to Colonel Maarouf, explaining that it decreased after that to less than 300 documents as a result of the measures taken by the Ministry of Interior to combat these crimes. .
Colonel Maarouf clarified that most of the forged certificate documents used to reach the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants when the beneficiary tried to authenticate them from the Syrian embassies abroad.
Concerning the forgery of legal agencies, Colonel Maarouf mentioned that the forgery was carried out with the intention of confirming the marriage by some of the reviewers of the transactions in partnership with some representatives of the Bar Association as a result of the absence of one of the spouses because he was outside Syria, where a person other than the person intended to establish the marriage was brought to prove the existence of more than 500 forged agencies, which required Arrest of its organizers, including 26 lawyers who hold the status of agency representatives.
In order to prevent and limit the cases of forgery mentioned above among the Colonel, it is known that the Bar Association was addressed not to certify any legitimate agency by the Syndicate and its branches in the governorates, except after extracting an incoming and outgoing movement from the Immigration and Passports Department for the two persons intended to confirm their marriage when organizing the legal agency.
Colonel Maarouf noted the measures taken by the Bar Association, which helped to uncover such crimes, as it adopted a new model for agencies bearing security marks that cannot be tampered with. It also worked to reduce the number of agency delegates, in addition to selecting lawyers with experience and expertise in this field.
Imran Issa and Mada Alloush