By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday; Page A04

TIJUANA, Mexico -- The two gunmen ambushed the delivery van in broad daylight. It was a professional heist with one target: bundles containing 6,000 identity
cards.

This border city, where the theft occurred in April, is no stranger to robbery and drug trafficking. But hijacking ID cards was new. The theft seemed odd until word
got out that the cards, issued by the U.S. government and allowing entry into the United States, were worth more than $1 million on the black market.

The theft illustrates the security threat from the multibillion-dollar global counterfeit document industry -- an underworld that traffics in both forgeries and authentic
IDs that have been stolen. In this case, the thieves apparently knew the cards were on the way to the Tijuana airport for delivery to U.S. consulates in Mexico,
where they were to be distributed to border-area residents who regularly cross to work or shop.

From Bangkok to Mexico City to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, many illegal immigrants and criminals rely on fake passports, driver's licenses, visas and other
documents to travel in and out of countries. FBI officials say that four of the Sept. 11 hijackers obtained valid Virginia driver's licenses using fraudulent
documentation.

Fake documents have been around nearly as long as real ones. But since the terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials in the United States and other countries have
focused on this black market and how it facilitates illegal cross-border traffic. Canada, for example, has announced a program that will make its passports more
difficult to duplicate.

Despite the crackdown, a Washington Post employee recently walked up to a cluster of print shops in downtown Mexico City and was immediately approached by
two men who asked what he was looking for. He said he had heard passports could be purchased there. The men took him to a small room in a dilapidated office
building where the walls were covered with framed posters of Mickey Mouse, Snow White and other cartoon characters.

A man there turned one of the posters around, revealing a hollow area where a plastic bag full of Mexican passports was hidden. The man said he could add a
phony name and photo to one of the passports for $150, and he offered a fake U.S. green card for $500. Together, such documents could be enough for someone
to enter the United States with a false identity.

Jim Hess, chief intelligence officer at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's fake document laboratory in Northern Virginia, said experts there are seeing a
flood of fraudulent documents. "Scanners and computer software have made it easier to be a counterfeiter," he said. "You used to have to have a skill, like
photography or printing. But now all you need is a ride to Circuit City."

The INS lab compares suspect identification with its worldwide collection of authentic passports and other documents. INS officers at an airport in New York or at
a crossing point on the border with Mexico, for example, can place a suspicious document under a camera that transmits the image in 15 seconds to the Northern
Virginia lab, where specialists can check its authenticity.

Authentic documents are in greater demand on the black market as officials have gotten better at detecting fakes. Scott Hatfield, INS attache at the U.S. consulate
here, said that impostors -- people using valid documents belonging to someone else -- have been increasing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Last year, INS border inspectors apprehended 52,000 people for document fraud at San Ysidro, the busiest U.S. port of entry, which links Tijuana to San Diego.
Of those arrested for trying to enter the United States illegally, 32,000 -- nearly 62 percent -- were carrying someone else's identification. More than 7,000 others
presented counterfeit or altered documents.

Hatfield said that inspectors now lift every hood and open every trunk, so it is much more difficult to enter the United States hidden in a car or truck. And he said
that since inspectors are scrutinizing documents like never before, fewer people have tried to use forgeries.

Before Sept. 11, cracking down on the fake documents industry flourishing in Mexican border towns was a low priority of the country's law enforcement
establishment. One of the most notorious counterfeiting shops, Foto Iris in Reynosa, was raided last week by the attorney general's office, after years of supplying
fake visas, passports and birth certificates to those who wanted to cross into McAllen, Tex.

Foto Iris has long been an annoyance to U.S. officials who sought its closure, particularly after one official walked into the shop several years ago and, for $200,
bought identification that allowed him to cross the border. These "fake doc shops" have taken on new importance as Washington seeks to crack down on people
slipping into the United States illegally.

There are many entrepreneurs like Foto Iris along the border, some producing high-quality Texas and California birth certificates, visas and passports, and some
printing "40-footers" -- work so shoddy that a border inspector can spot it from 40 feet away.

Arrests and seizures in the United States involving fake documents have increased in recent years. The INS presented 12,400 people for prosecution for crimes
involving fake documents in the 11 months from last October through August -- nearly double the number for 1996.

Last year, in one of the largest fraudulent document seizures in history, the INS confiscated 1 million green cards, Social Security cards and driver's licenses found in
three storage units in Los Angeles. Investigators also found a number of counterfeiting machines and printing presses and arrested five undocumented Mexicans.

As one INS official said, "What one man creates, another man can copy."

The black market value of documents ranges from $25 for a poor-quality forgery of a U.S. driver's license to $10,000 for a valid Japanese passport to $25,000 for
an authentic U.S. diplomatic passport.

Thousands of Mexican citizens cross the border into the United States every day to work and shop. "Border visas," for those who qualify for them, permit free
passage within 25 miles of the border.

On Oct. 1, the U.S. government stopped honoring millions of identification documents used to cross the border, some of which were crumpled old papers dating
back to the 1950s. Those easy-to-counterfeit documents have been replaced with new "laser" IDs, which resemble credit cards. They can be scanned by machine
and are embedded with a hologram that is hard to replicate.

It was these new laser ID cards that the gunmen stole from the delivery van here in April. Although each bore the photo of its proper user, they were still a hot
commodity. Each of the 6,000 stolen cards has a street value of $200, making the heist worth about $1.2 million.

With the help of the Mexican police, about 2,000 cards have been recovered. INS officials said the other 4,000 are unusable because border agents running them
through a computer scanner would see that they had been canceled. However, many border stations lack up-to-date scanners.

A well-known place to buy forgeries is the Santo Domingo area in downtown Mexico City. Last month, police raided 18 print shops there and seized a ton of fake
documents, including baptismal certificates, tax receipts and military records.

The shops are still operating, but at least one forger said his phony passport business has been suspended. He said that with heightened U.S. border security since
Sept. 11, he worries that the fakes could be detected and traced back to him.

Outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, those who have been rejected for tourist or student visas encounter Plan B: eager counterfeiters hawking their services.
The sellers offer green cards, visas or border ID cards -- some forged, some stolen and some "rented." The rentals are part of a sub-trade in documents, where the
owner temporarily hands them over for a price.

Even Mexican police officers use fake IDs. According to Alfredo Zavala, the director of public security for Naucalpan, a suburb of Mexico City, about two dozen
applicants for police jobs are turned away every month for supplying false documents. Applicants, he said, have supplied everything from fabricated high school
transcripts to phony proof of military service.

Sullivan reported from Mexico City.

                                               © 2001 The Washington Post Company