Bulgarian Authorities Bust Fake Documents and Money Ring

Bulgaria’s Chief Directorate for Combatting Organised Crime and the Specialised Prosecutor's Office on 21^st of March disrupted a crime ring for production of fake documents intended for the Albanian market.

A total of six Bulgarians have been charged for involvement in the criminal scheme. Over 40 searches have been carried out in Sofia, Rousse and Sliven. The place for the production of fake documents was in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city. More than 500,000 counterfeit euros were found during the searches.

The crime ring operated for several years. The operation for its disruption was supported by Europol.

Ivan Geshev, Head of the Specialised Prosecutor's Office said that a number of false documents were found in a workshop in Plovdiv and other locations including identity documents, Bulgarian passports, ID cards, Turkish, Danish, Romanian and Spanish passports, Albanian certificates of employment, multiple photos in passport format, as well as computer configurations, documents, flash drives, and various electronic devices.

The Bulgarian authorities initiated investigation after an alert from their Albania counterparts.

The documents were sold to an Albanian crime group that smuggled people mainly in the United States, Canada and the UK. The Albanians travelled with their own documents, and then on the territory of Europe and Dominican republic, they would replace them with the Bulgarian counterfeits.

Stoyan Temelakiev, Deputy Director of the directorate for combatting organised crime, said that the migrants were paying the organised crime group 7,000 pounds to enter the UK with all logistics along the route and from $ 25,000 to $ 35,000 for the United States and Canada.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, the scheme has been operational for several years, and thousands have managed to go through border control undetected because of the high quality of the counterfeits.